Cultural Philanthropy David Scott Mitchell and the Mitchell Library

Submitted by Eileen Chanin B.A., M.Ed. (Hons)

This thesis is submitted to the School of Art History and Art Education at the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2012

University of New South Wales New South Wales Australia PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Chanin

First name: Eileen Other name/s: Anne

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Art History and Education Faculty: College of Fine Arts

Title: Cultural Philanthropy, David Scott Mitchell and the Mitchell Library

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE

The bequest from David Scott Mitchell made possible the foundation of Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Earlier accounts have called into question Mitchell’s philanthropic impulse. Opinion ranges from seeing Mitchell as a principal turn-of-the-century benefactor to questioning that he even be considered a philanthropist. Accounts of David Scott Mitchell have so far failed to fully explain the historic and cultural context for his gift. This study investigates Mitchell’s life and times and the context of the culture of philanthropy which so influenced his gift. Misunderstanding of Mitchell stemmed from scant documentation and historical biases, such that he is both legendary and has been misread. Case study format is used to review his history and to recalibrate the truth about him, his motivation and milieu. Evidence from his collection, matched with other documentation, reveals and surveys the philanthropic legacy that Mitchell inherited from his forebears, the understandings and practices of philanthropy in his circle, and the network of ideas concerning benefaction that he knew. Analysis of his altruism in its historical context locates a more dynamic and textured truth than was previously accepted about him. It overturns misunderstanding and shows the deep purpose, and interest in Sydney’s future, that lay behind his generosity. The underlying reasons for benevolent activism such as library benefaction at the turn of the twentieth century has been explained in terms of economic motives and of social control. The experience of David Scott Mitchell illustrates that cultural philanthropy is more complex than these explanations suggest. He inherited understandings of benefaction; experienced the culture of giving that existed during his lifetime – particularly that which existed within his circle; and marked cultural philanthropy. His history, and that of his ‘civilizing mission’, offers perspective on practices and understandings of benefaction as they evolved through the nineteenth into the early twentieth century.

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Dated ……………………………………………...... Abstract The bequest from David Scott Mitchell made possible the foundation of Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Earlier accounts have called into question Mitchell’s philanthropic impulse. Opinion ranges from seeing Mitchell as a principal turn-of-the-century benefactor to questioning that he even be considered a philanthropist. Accounts of David Scott Mitchell have so far failed to fully explain the historic and cultural context for his gift. This study investigates Mitchell’s life and times and the context of the culture of philanthropy which so influenced his gift.

Misunderstanding of Mitchell stemmed from scant documentation and historical biases, such that he is both legendary and has been misread. Case study format is used to review his history and to recalibrate the truth about him, his motivation and milieu. Evidence from his collection, matched with other documentation, reveals and surveys the philanthropic legacy that Mitchell inherited from his forebears, the understandings and practices of philanthropy in his circle, and the network of ideas concerning benefaction that he knew. Analysis of his altruism in its historical context locates a more dynamic and textured truth than was previously accepted about him. It overturns misunderstanding and shows the deep purpose, and interest in Sydney’s future, that lay behind his generosity.

The underlying reasons for benevolent activism such as library benefaction at the turn of the twentieth century has been explained in terms of economic motives and of social control. The experience of David Scott Mitchell illustrates that cultural philanthropy is more complex than these explanations suggest. He inherited understandings of benefaction; experienced the culture of giving that existed during his lifetime – particularly that which existed within his circle; and marked cultural philanthropy. His history, and that of his ‘civilizing mission’, offers perspective on practices and understandings of benefaction as they evolved through the nineteenth into the early twentieth century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………..i List of Appendices……………………………………………………………...iii Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………..iv Notes………………………………………………………………………….....vi Chapter 1 Introduction…………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2 Charting Knowledge: Literature Review………………………...14 2.1 Views about Mitchell……………………………………………….15 2.2 Conceptions of Philanthropy..…………………………………….. 27 2.3 Inter-related issues required in research on Mitchell………………40 2.4 Building the public sphere in civil society……………………….... 54 Chapter 3 Methodology………………………………………………………..68

Section One Family Years 1836-1873 Chapter 4 Cultural Inheritance: Inherited Understandings of Assistance…93 4.1 Inherited background: Family philanthropic tradition………………94 4.2 Cultural influences: Associational culture and ties to philanthropy…………………………………………………………111

4.3 ‘Self-Help’ and communitarian ethos: The shape of progress………123 4.4 The Voluntary principle: cooperatives and mutual aid groups……...129 Chapter 5 Cultural Reflection: The Culture of Giving……………………...142

5.1 Forces of change, individualism and collectivism…………………..142

5.2 Building a common culture………………………………………….148 5.3 Common culture of learning…………………………………………149 5.4 Public Duty, Useful Knowledge and Mechanics Institutes………….154

Section Two Independent Years 1873-1907 Chapter 6 Cultural Action: Giving in Mitchell’s Circle…………………….193

6.1 Meeting Need: Benefaction as a family affair………………………194 6.2 Weighing up inequality and call to action…..………………………209 6.3 Philanthropy and culture: Erecting monuments……………………..215 6.4 Mitchell’s Circle of Learning……………………………………….239

Chapter 7 Cultural Creation: Ensuring the Mitchell Library………...……252

7.1 A Time for New Philanthropy...…………………………………….253 7.2 The Principle of Joint Effort and Cultural Change…………………260 7.3 Museum & Library Movement……………………………………..281 7.4 Reading Mitchell: The librarian and the bibliophile………………..298

Chapter 8 Conclusion: Cultural Legacy 8.1 Changing Culture: From Private Beneficence to State Patronage of Culture…………………………………………………………….304

8.2 A ‘National Library’ from One Man’s Collection..…………………311 8.3 Conclusion…………………………………………………………...317

Appendices…………….………………………………………………………...337 Select Bibliography 1. Primary Sources 1.1 Manuscript Sources (and printed transcripts)……………………….348 1.2 Photographic Archives and Pictorial Material………………………350 1.3 Contemporary Published Sources 1.3.i Official Publications and State Papers……………….………...351 1.3.ii Select Newspapers and Periodicals…………………………...352 1.3.iii Books and Pamphlets………………………………………..353 2. Secondary Sources 2.1 Books and Journals…………………………………………….375 2.2 Unpublished Dissertations……………………………………..424 2.3 Electronic Resources…………………………………………..426 Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people who have each helped me immeasurably. Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn, as supervisor, gave me her encouragement, and Associate Professor Anne O’Brien, as co-supervisor, offered valuable discussion as did Dr Susan Best, Coordinator of Postgraduate Research at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Iain Sommerville showed me where his Mitchell family ancestors sprang from and introduced me to the landscape of Fife. I have benefitted from the experience of Mitchell Librarians Gordon Richardson, Alan Ventress, Elizabeth Ellis and Richard Neville. The staff at Mitchell Library have been very helpful, particularly Dixson Librarian, Mark Hildebrand. Most especially, I am grateful to the late Arthur Easton who took the greatest interest in looking beyond a history that is generally perceived as being already familiar. Many other librarians and archivists have been generous with their time and knowledge. Among them were Anna Blackman, The Hocken Collections, Dunedin; Carolyne Bruyn, AMP Ltd; Lyn Crawford, Mitchell Library Archivist, Glasgow; Gionni Di Gravio, University Archivist, University of Newcastle; Bruce Gorie, Secretary to Lyon Clerk, The Court of the Lord Lyon, Edinburgh; Mira Gogova, Archivist, Royal Society of Medicine, London; Jonathan Harrison, St John’s College, Cambridge; Susan Halpert, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Bridget Howell, Senior Archivist, City of London Corporation; Josephine Hutchings, Lincoln’s Inn Library Archivist; Steven Kerr, Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh; Gary Kurutz, Director, Special Collections Branch, California State Library, San Francisco; Robert Lawrie, Parliamentary Archivist, State Parliament of New South Wales; Julia Mant, University of Sydney Archivist; Erica McDonald, Ward Library, Peterhouse, Cambridge; Lois McEvey, State Library of Victoria; Adrian McMinn, University of New South Wales; Judy Messiter, Lake Macquarie City Library; Edith Petten- Rosenthal and Anton Löffelmeier, Stadtarchiv, Munich; Sue Ryan, Newcastle Region Library; Katherine Spears, Quaritch Archives, London; Rachel Stockdale, Department of Manuscripts, The British Library; Dr. Louise A. L. Trott, Sydney Diocesan Archivist; Janette Wells, St James’ Old Cathedral, Melbourne; Wendy Woods, National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies in the United Kingdom. i Scholarship thrives on exchanging ideas and I appreciate those generously shared with me by historians Beverley Kingston, Brian Fletcher, Julia Horne, Gerald Walsh and Dr Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago. Dr Greg Fox Macquarie Ancient Languages School, Macquarie University and Dr Russell L. Cope guided my need for translation. Also enriching were many conversations exchanged with State Library of New South Wales Research Fellows Dr Amanda Card; Leila Elmoos; Dr Nathan Garvey; Dr Peter Tyler; and Robert Holden.

ii Appendices

Appendix 1. David Scott Mitchell, Public Benefaction 1898-1905

Appendix 2. ‘At the pinnacle of the collecting heirarchy’: Comparable Bibliophiles (Ker, Heber, Mitchell)

Appendix 3. Sources on David Scott Mitchell 1907-2007

Appendix 4. David Scott Mitchell: Personal and institutional overlap

Appendix 5. Selected Conceptual Frameworks of Philanthropy (‘Giving Behaviour’)

Appendix 6. Eras of Philanthropism spanning David Scott Mitchell’s history

Appendix 7. David Scott Mitchell (1836-1907): Phases of life

Appendix 8. Darnton’s ‘Communication Circuit’: A reader-oriented approach

Appendix 9. Population of Sydney 1851-1911 Appendix 10. Social enterprise: Philanthropic foundation of selected voluntary associational organisations, social ventures and cultural repositories, Sydney 1813-1909

Appendix 11. Summary of Prominent Benefaction in Australia 1879-1893

iii Abbreviations

AA Adelaide Advertiser (Adelaide: F. D. Burdon & J.L. Bonython, 1889- 1931) ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography

AHS Australian Historical Studies (Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1988-) ANL Australian National Library, Canberra

BC Brisbane Courier (1861-1864); The Brisbane Courier (Brisbane: Brisbane Newspaper Company Ltd., 1864-1933)

BL British Library, London BL,Add. British Library, Additional Manuscripts CUS The Sydney University Calendar (Sydney: Joseph Cook, 1853-1887); Calendar of the University of Sydney (Sydney: Gibbs, Shallard & Co., 1888-1942)

DL Dixson Library (State Library of New South Wales), Sydney FLS Fellow of the Literary Society FPL Free Public LIbrary

FRS Fellow of the Royal Society GG New South Wales Government Gazette (Sydney: Government Printer, 1832-1900); Government Gazette for the State of New South Wales (Sydney: Government Printer, 1901-) GM Gentleman’s Magazine (London: 1731-1907)

HLQ The Huntington Library Quarterly (San Marino, Calif.: Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery, 1937-)

HM The Mercury (Hobart Town: John Davies, 1860-)

HRA Historical Records of Australia, ed. Fredk. Watson (Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1914-1925)

HRNSW Historical Records of New South Wales, ed. A Britton and F.M. Bladen, 7 vols in 8 parts, (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer,. 1892-1901) JRAHS Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society (Sydney: The Society, 1918-1964); Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (Sydney: The Society, 1964-) ML Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney iv MM Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser (Maitland, NSW: Thomas William Tucker & Richard Jones, 1843-1893) MBC The Moreton Bay Courier (Brisbane: Arthur Sidney Lyon, 1846- 1861) NAPSS National Association for the Promotion of Social Science NTT&G Northern Territory Times & Gazette (Palmerton, N.T.: Northern Territory Times & Gazette, 1873-1927) NYT New York Times (New York: H. J. Raymond & Co., 1857) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

PLNSW Public Library of New South Wales PRO Public Records Office RAHS Royal Australian Historical Society RGSA Royal Geographical Society of Australasia

SA Singleton Argus & Upper Hunter General Advocate (Singleton, N.S.W.: Boyce & Pinchin, 1874-1880); Singleton Argus (Singleton, N.S.W.: F.J. Roginson & H.S. Robinson, 1880-) SDT Sydney Daily Telegraph (Sydney: Consolidated Press, 1879-1990)

SG The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (Sydney: G.Howe, 1803-1842) SLNSW State Library of New South Wales

SLV State Library of Victoria SM Sydney Mail (Sydney: John Fairfax & Sons, 1860-01871); Sydney Mail & New South Wales Advertiser (Sydney: John Fairfax and Sons, 1871-1912)

SMH Sydney Herald (Sydney: Ward Stephens & Others, 1831-42); Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney: Charles Kemp & John Fairfax, from August 1842) SUM Sydney University Magazine (Sydney: Waugh and Cox, 1855) Times The London Times (London: Times Newspapers, 1788-)

V & P Votes and Proceedings (of Colonial, later State Parliaments) WA The West Australian (Perth, W.A.: A Dividson, for The West Australian, 1879-)

v Notes 1. Books referred to that Mitchell owned are shown by their catalogue number in Sydney’s Mitchell Library. These bear the prefix ‘DSM’, Mitchell’s initials. 2. Where ‘the university’ is referred to in Sydney, this refers to the University of Sydney, it being the only university in Sydney at the time. 3. For currency conversion I have relied on the currency convertor from the UK National Archives, see: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/results.asp#mid

vi Chapter One Introduction

David Scott Mitchell single-handedly created Australia’s first research facility for history, gave reason to erect a library building for the State of New South Wales in 1910, and left a bequest to continue developing the library’s collection (Appendix 1). His collection and bequest established Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Marking the centenary of his death in 2007, and introducing the first extensive history of the Mitchell Library to be published, State Library of New South Wales Librarian Regina A. Sutton declared that ‘Mitchell’s gift is the nation’s greatest cultural benefaction’.1 She reiterated the view that has been held for the past century that Mitchell left a unique and irreplaceable legacy. His collection (particularly his Australiana collection), and the additions to it that his bequest made possible through the past century, is viewed as one of Australia’s preeminent cultural assets. She acknowledged the cultural uniqueness of Mitchell’s philanthropic act as being ‘crucial to the nation [for] – the study of Australia itself.’ Accordingly, the State Library of New South Wales says that ‘no other act of philanthropy in Australia has performed such a cultural coup’.2 Mitchell’s generosity is celebrated. In 1943 the Mitchell Library remained ‘by far the largest library endowment in Australia’ and the Library was known ‘as one of the great historical and national collections of the world.’3 More recently, the Encyclopedia of the Australian People states that Mitchell’s contribution to libraries is unmatched.4 Gordon Richardson concludes in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, that Mitchell’s library ‘remains unrivalled in its field and is one of the great national collections in the world’.5 Mitchell’s importance as a cultural

1 Brian H. Fletcher, Magnificent Obsession, The Story of the Mitchell Library, Sydney (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007), x. 2 State Library of New South Wales, ‘100 objects, ONE hundred celebrates the Mitchell Library’s first century’, ONE Hundred (2010) online at http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/exhibitions/2010/onehundred/100-objects/ (accessed November 6, 2010). 3 Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, The Public Library of New South Wales (Sydney: The Trustees, 1943), 40. Colin Steele, Major Libraries of the World, A Selective Guide (London; New York: Bowker, 1976), 9. 4 M. D. Prentis, ‘Scots’ in James Jupp, ed., The Australian People, An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 664. 5 G. D. Richardson, ‘Mitchell, David Scott (1836–1907)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974), 260-1 online at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mitchell-david-scott-4210/text6781 (accessed August 20, 2011). Both the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Monash Biography Dictionary list Mitchell as a bibliophile and philanthropist: John Arnold & Dierdre Morris, eds., Monash Biographical Dictionary

1 philanthropist is uncontested. Curiously, this distinction has so far escaped scrutiny by historians. Exceptionally, historian Gordon Greenwood describes the remarkable range and rapidity of national development between federation and the First World War. He cites the Mitchell collection of Australiana as providing stimulus to this, seeing Mitchell’s public-spirited generosity as testament to ‘a stirring of the Australian spirit issuing in a nation-wide cultural advance matching the political’.6 Somewhat echoing Greenwood, the English author Geoffrey Moorhouse is of the view that Mitchell’s ‘particular genius was to recognise that his own country was developing a cut of its own and that the growing documentation of this still tender plant needed safeguarding’.7 A contemporaneous publication about Sydney also singles out Mitchell. Discussing the urban larrikinism that featured in the latter years of the nineteenth century, Lucy Hughes Turnbull reflects on the lack of interest taken in Sydney in reducing this menace through philanthropy. She writes that the larrikin ethos became part of Sydney’s overall character, whereas ‘private philanthropy has until recent years not been a prominent or widespread feature of Sydney’s culture, though there are always exceptions, the most prominent of these being David Scott Mitchell’.8 In general, while accounts acknowledge ‘the priceless heritage that is David Scott Mitchell’s collection of Australiana’, with the partial exception of my book Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, discussion about Mitchell conflates with discussion of the State Library of New South Wales (which keeps his collection) without historical appreciation of his singular philanthropy.9 Accounts have so far failed to fully explain the historic and cultural context for his gift and have called into question Mitchell’s philanthropic impulse. Opinion ranges from seeing Mitchell as a principal turn-of-the-century benefactor to questioning that he even be

of Twentieth Century Australia (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Reed Reference Publishing, 1994), 375. In general, Mitchell is listed as a book collector: Elizabeth Butel et al, eds., The People who made Australia Great (Sydney: Collins Australia, 1988), 161-2. 6 Gordon Greenwood, ed., Australia, A Social and Political History (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1955/1966), 233. 7 Geoffrey Moorhouse, Sydney (St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 145. 8 Lucy Hughes Turnbull, Sydney; Biography of a City (Milsons Point, N.S.W.: Random House Australia, 1999), 119. 9 Isadore Brodsky, Sydney’s Phantom Book Shops (Sydney: University Cooperative Bookshop Limited, 1973), 81. Eileen Chanin, Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell (North Melbourne, Vic.: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011).

2 considered a philanthropist. Discussion largely comes from librarians concerned with organising collections of books and related materials rather than from historians who study past events. Perhaps for this reason ‘Australia’s greatest book collector’ and his history is considered to remain an ‘abiding enigma’.10 Book Life attempts to revise this myth that Mitchell is ‘unknowable’, and recover his story before it slips from history, so that it can be appreciated in its proper historical context.11 Necessarily the focus of the book was more general in its outline, whereas this study is devoted to Mitchell’s philanthropic sense and intentions. Other preeminent public benefactors of late 19th and early 20th century Australia have already been the subject of significant research. Accounts that exist include those of English-born and Melbourne-based manufacturing chemist Alfred Felton (1831-1904), the slightly earlier Sir Thomas Elder (1818-1897) whose bequest benefitted Adelaide, and the slightly later Sidney Myer (1878-1934).12 Sir Redmond Barry (1813-1880), father of the Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria) and its then associated Art Gallery, has been the subject of three studies.13 No comparative analysis has been undertaken of Mitchell. This study will be the first to investigate Mitchell’s life and times and the context of the culture of philanthropy which so influenced his gift. Overall few published studies contextualize or offer analysis into the

10 Paul Brunton, review of Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, by Eileen Chanin, ‘Mitchell’s Cockatoo, The abiding enigma of Australia’s greatest book collector’, Australian Book Review (July-August, 2011): 16. 11 Colin Steele, review of Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, by Eileen Chanin, Canberra Times, June 11, 2011; Ross Fitzgerald, review of Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, by Eileen Chanin, Sydney Morning Herald, June 25, 2011, Spectrum: 35; Simon Caterson, review of Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, by Eileen Chanin, Weekend Australian, June 25, 2011, Review Section:18; Owen Richardson, review of Book Life, The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell, by Eileen Chanin, The Age, June 4, 2011, 30. 12 John Poynter, Mr Felton’s Bequests, 2nd ed. (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2008); Alison Inglis, ‘Alfred Felton as a collector of art’ in Great Philanthropists on Trial: the Art of the Bequest, eds. Andrew Grimwade and Gerard Vaughan (Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and the Felton Bequests’ Committee, 2006), 37-56. Gwenyth Rankin, ‘No Flowers, or Trustees, by Request: Bernard Hall and the Felton Bequest’, Journal of Australian Studies 30, no. 88 (January 2006): 125-133; Ron Radford, The Story of the Elder Bequest (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000); Christopher Menz, ‘The Elder and Morgan Thomas Bequests at the Art Gallery of South Australia’ in Grimwade, Great Philanthropists, 113-125; Michael Liffman, A Tradition of Giving: Seventy-Five Years of Myer Family Philanthropy (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2004). See also Stella M. Barber, Sidney Myer: A Life, A Legacy (Prahran, Vic.: Hardie Grant, 2005). 13 Peter Ryan, Redmond Barry, A Colonial Life, 2nd ed. (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1980). Ann Galbally, Redmond Barry, An Anglo-Irish Australian, (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1995). Graham Fricke, Ned’s Nemesis Ned Kelly & Redmond Barry in a clash of cultures (North Melbourne, Vic.: Arcadia, 2007).

3 motivation of fin-de-siècle benefactors to cultural institutions in Australia. Generally, accounts about benefactors to art galleries, museums and libraries sit within historical narratives about these institutions. John Poynter’s study of Alfred Felton is notable for the insight it offers into how Felton’s benefaction, to purchase works of art and objects deemed to improve public taste, developed Australian cultural life.14 Poynter’s narrative is organized in two parts: he dwells on Felton’s biography before turning to the history of Felton’s bequest and how it enriched the National Gallery of Victoria. The importance of private philanthropy to Australia’s cultural wealth was acknowledged to be ‘transforming’ to bodies like the National Gallery of Victoria and their communities, although how donors came to bequeath funds ‘is not quite clear’.15 Other than by way of biographical focus (such as Poynter engaged) accounts of benefactors are generally buried within institutional histories. Customarily these histories emphasize institutional development and offer little analysis of how widespread was the belief held by benefactors in the civilizing process of educational, scientific and cultural repositories like museums and libraries that would advance colonial modernity and progress.16 The importance of Mitchell’s achievement is undeniable. Following his death he was ranked alongside the country’s foremost philanthropists. The Hobart Mercury wrote that with the ‘Wilsons, Clarkes, Walkers, and Feltons, David Mitchell will be remembered as one who did enduring work in his day and generation, and, departing, left the fruits of his labours to his country.’17 Yet we know little more about him today

14 Daryl Lindsay, comp., The Felton Bequest, An Historical Record 1904-1959 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), 19. Felton’s will specified that the Trustees of his bequest should acquire items possessing an educational value for Melbourne’s (then) National Art Gallery. 15 Gerard Vaughan, ‘Before Felton – Private Philanthropy and the NGV 1861-1904’ in Great Philanthropists on Trial, The Art of the Bequest edited by Andrew Grimwade and Gerard Vaughan (Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and the Felton Bequests’ Committee, 2006), 2, 18, 114. 16 Felton, Elder and Myer believed that remedy for poverty lay in education for all. They respected learning and culture: Gary Johns and Don D’Cruz, ‘The Capture of the Myer Foundation’, Review – Institute of Public Affairs 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 3; Michael E. Hoare, Science and scientific associations in eastern Australia, 1820-1890 (PhD diss., Australian National University, 1974). The educational significance of bequests was emphasised at Philanthropy Australia’s Felton Centenary Symposium, National Gallery of Victoria in November 2004, addressing the history of private philanthropy in the support of public art museums and art galleries in Australia: Grimwade and Vaughan, Philanthropists, 10, 102. 17 Mercury, January 10, 1908, 4: referring to journalist Edward Wilson (1813-1878) who left a trust that handsomely benefitted charities in Victoria; brothers Sir William John Clarke (1831-1897), Victoria’s largest landowner and Joseph Clarke (1834-1895), both generous benefactors; Sydney merchant and banker Thomas Walker (1804-1886) and his daughter Eadith Campbell Walker (1861- 1937), benefactors to charities and convalescent hospitals in Sydney. Michael Clarke, Clarke of

4 than what was reported when he died. He is absent from assessment of ‘major bequests and gifts to Australia’s public art collections’ at the Symposium held in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Felton Bequest.18 Indeed, Arthur Easton (1949-2009), Mitchell Library’s manuscripts archivist, pointed out that Mitchell was overlooked in recent newspaper editorial focus on philanthropy.19 Yet Mitchell inherited understandings of benefaction, experienced the culture of giving that existed during his lifetime, and in turn, he marked cultural philanthropy. His history offers perspective on practices and understandings of benefaction as they evolved through the nineteenth into the early twentieth century. His experience illustrates that cultural philanthropy is more complex than present explanations suggest. Locating a more dynamic and textured truth about Mitchell than accepted knowledge allows will also uncover the complexity of cultural philanthropy. Discussing enthusiasm for collecting Australiana during the 1890s, Brian Fletcher believes that Mitchell overshadowed other collectors: he is ‘the greatest of Australia’s collectors’.20 Notably too, Mitchell maintained collecting – and even increased his efforts in terms of the amounts that he spent on collecting – in the last decade of his life. During this time, as Fayette Gosse shows from Joanna Barr Smith’s letters, the depression of the 1890s impacted significantly on even the wealthiest of collectors (like the Barr-Smiths).21 It is important to appreciate how Mitchell’s interest in Australiana was both ahead of yet also part of collecting trends in his day. Mitchell’s interest in Australiana was ahead of collecting taste from the perspective of collecting in Victoria. However, it was in keeping with the deliberate policy of buying Australian art begun in the

Rupertswood 1931-1897: the Life and Times of William John Clarke (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1995). Edward Wilson (of the Argus) Trust, A Million for Charity! A Great Victorian Philanthropist, Edward Wilson, of “The Argus” Proprietory (born 1814, died 1878), Founder of the Edward Wilson Charities Trust (Melbourne: Argus, 1928). 18 Philanthropy Australia’s Symposium, National Gallery of Victoria, 22 April 2004 at which bequests were measured against Felton’s bequest, the ‘benchmark of Australia’s first great philanthropic bequest’: Grimwade, Great Philanthropists, cover sleeve. Mitchell’s collection included works of art, which remain to be singled out for study. 19 There is no mention of Mitchell in Philanthropy Australia’s Timeline of Australian Philanthropy (2008). Philanthropy Australia, ‘Timeline of Australian Philanthropy’, Philanthropy Wiki online at http://philanthropywiki.org.au/index.php/Timeline_of_Australian_Philanthropy (accessed December 7, 2010; ‘Let one man's gift lead the way for others’, SMH, April 5, 2008, 38; Letters to the Editor, SMH, April 7, 2008, 8. 20 Brian H. Fletcher, Australian History in New South Wales 1888-1938 (Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University Press, 1993), 29. 21 Joanna Barr Smith, Joanna and Robert: the Barr Smiths’ life in letters, 1853-1919, ed. Fayette Gosse (Adelaide: Barr Smith Press, 1996).

5 1880s by the Art Gallery of New South Wales when pride in local progress was manifest.22 Describing changes in people’s perception of themselves through the 1890s, the illustrated chronicle 1901, Australian Life at Federation speaks of Mitchell’s donation to the State of New South Wales and of his patronage of the Royal Australian Historical Society. He is said to have devised the Society’s motto Vetris non inscius aevi (not unmindful of the past).23 Moreover, Mitchell formed and housed his collection in Australia, unlike other collectors who assembled collections in England from new fortunes derived from Australia.24 He collected Australian material while they did not. One reason why Mitchell’s legacy has been poorly understood is that neither his printed collection of books nor his collection of manuscripts were fully identified until 2007. In 2002, in anticipation of commemorating the 2007 centenary of Mitchell’s death, the State Library of New South Wales sought to redress this lack of knowledge and initiated the Mitchell Bequest Project (colloquially termed by library staff as the ‘Finding David’ Project). Mitchell customarily signed each item that he owned. Over the ensuing four years, volunteers combed every shelf of the library for items bearing Mitchell’s signature. These were sleeved in a mylar jacket and electronically catalogued with the prefix ‘DSM’, Mitchell’s initials. A century after his death, a relatively complete picture – as far as can be ascertained – of what made up the printed material in his collection first became clear.25 Close to 40,000 printed titles and nearly as many manuscripts were catalogued from Mitchell’s personal library. Roughly a third of the print titles were entered for

22 Ann Galbally, The Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), 32. 23 Aedeen Cremin, ed., 1901, Australian Life at Federation: An Illustrated Chronicle (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press for the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2001), 90. 24 Examples in London come from mining millionaires George McCulloch and William Knox d’Arcy, and British prints and drawings collectors William Mitchell and John Malcolm of Poltalloch whose collections were assembled from profits gained from their livestock and land holdings in Australia, as was the colossal fortune gained likewise by George Salting (1835-1909). On McCulloch and d’Arcy see Vaughan, ‘Before Felton’, 6; on the others see Stephen Coppel, ‘William Mitchell (1820-1908) and John Malcolm of Poltalloch (1805-93)’ in Antony Griffiths, ed. Landmarks in Print Collecting, Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753 (London; Houston: British Museum Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1996), 159-188. 25 Since then further items bearing Mitchell’s initials have been unearthed. Mitchell’s collection of bookplates remains to be catalogued as of late-2010.

6 the first time on the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANDB).26 That these 10,485 titles existed nowhere else in Australia highlights the unique nature of Mitchell’s collection and his expertise as a collector. No literature on this fresh contribution to the intellectual capital of the nation exists. The State Library of New South Wales’ One Hundred exhibition, celebrating the Mitchell Library’s first centenary in 2010, emphasized institutional collection development rather than Mitchell’s ownership of presented items.27 The seeming lack of interest in the history of Mitchell as a collector is curious for two reasons. To begin with, for the past century he has been consistently portrayed as an obsessive collector.28 This view was further emphasized when his portrait was featured on the cover of Brian Fletcher’s institutional history of the State Library of New South Wales, Magnificent obsession: the story of the Mitchell Library.29 This is a surprising view given that so little has been known about his collecting, but also when (in terms of library history, as information scholar Paul Sturges observes) public libraries are ‘much more about people’ than they are about books; they are social institutions.30

Secondly, a substantial body of literature exists internationally on the history of collecting, of collections and of provenance (some of which Mitchell knew).31 Underpinning this literature is the significant role that collectors like Mitchell have

26 Thirty four per cent of Mitchell’s titles, 10,485 titles, were previously unrecorded and contributed to the National Bibliographic Database: Library Council of New South Wales, Annual Report, 2006- 2007 (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2007), 21; Ellis, ‘Truth’, 97. 27 Five items belonging to Mitchell’s bequest were exhibited: State Library of New South Wales (with an essay by David Marr), One Hundred: A Tribute to the Mitchell Library (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2010); For a review see John Thompson, ‘Eureka’, Australian Book Review (July-August, 2010), 54-55. 28 Paul Brunton and Elizabeth Ellis, A Grand Obsession: The D. S. Mitchell Story (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2007). Up to 2011, the catalogue to this exhibition was the only monograph that existed on Mitchell. 29 Brian Fletcher, Obsession, 28-41; With 28 of 512 pages devoted to Mitchell, this is somewhat emblematic of the institutional history of Mitchell’s library which is subsumed into the State Library collections. 30 Paul Sturges, ‘Public library people 1850–1919’ in The Cambridge Histories of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 3, 1850–2000, eds. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 110. 31 Among this literature that Mitchell knew was Edward Edwards’ Libraries and Founders of Libraries (London: Trübner, 1864) (DSM/010.9/E) and Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (London: Trübner, 1870) (DSM/027.5/). Further literature includes: Frances Fowle, ‘Patterns of taste: Scottish collectors and the making of cultural identity in the late nineteenth century’, in A Shared Legacy: Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture (British Art and Visual Culture since 1750: New Readings) eds. Fintan Cullen and John Morrison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 173-90. Also, David E. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, A History: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

7 played in terms of intellectual heritage, as preservers of material that might have otherwise been lost.32 Notwithstanding this Mitchell’s collecting history remains unstudied. Perhaps this is due to the collecting histories of Australian collectors generally being anchored within institutional histories, or tied to particular institutional collections (if not to particular themed exhibitions), rather than being researched for their individual history.33 The centenary of Mitchell’s death was observed in July 2007. The NSW Governor Marie Bashir paid tribute to Mitchell, visiting his grave where she laid a wreath. She acknowledged the importance of Mitchell’s bequest ‘to our state, to our nation, and even beyond’ as ‘incalculable’’.34 Marie Bashir reinforced the view expressed earlier by Isadore Brodsky that the nation’s ledgers are indebted to Mitchell for the priceless heritage that is his collection.35 As she put it, ‘I have always said that, if ordered, in the most catastrophic of times imaginable, in fantasy, to save just one man-made structure in Australia from destruction I would immediately nominate the Mitchell Library with all its contents.’ Her opinion concurred with the gratitude to Mitchell that writers such as Manning Clark, Robert Hughes and Kate Grenville have long expressed.36 As the

32 Robert A. Shaddy, Books and Book Collecting in America, 1890-1930 (Lewiston, N. Y.: Edwin Mellen press, 2000), 4-5; Alan Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 271; Play on the importance of private libraries to a society’s cultural and intellectual fabric is made by Pearson, writing from a British perspective: David Pearson, ‘Private libraries and the collecting instinct.’ in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 3, 1850–2000, eds. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 180. On provenance see David Pearson, Books as History, the Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts (London: British Library, 2008). 33 Example of institutional histories include Brian Reid, ed., Collectors and Museums: Two Centuries of Collecting in the Northern Territory (Darwin, N. T.: Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 2009); State Library of New South Wales, Celebrating 100 Years of the Mitchell Library (Edgecliff, N. S. W.: Focus Publishing, 2000); For example of a themed exhibition see, Nick Waterlow, A Century of Collecting, 1901-2001: Celebrating the Centenary of Federation by Showcasing Works from Private Collections (Paddington, N.S.W.: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, 2001). 34 Alex Tibbitts, ‘Grave moment honours man who collected history of a nation’, SMH, July 25, 2007, 8. 35 Brodsky, Phantom Book Shops, 81. 36 Robert Hughes, ‘Foreword’, in Ann Robertson, Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales, The Australiana Collections (Sydney: Collins, 1988), 10. Alan Birch and David S. Macmillan, arr. introd., The Sydney Scene, 1788-1960 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), 247. Kate Grenville, ‘Hunters and Gatherers: A Novelist’s Debt to the Mitchell Library’, David Scott Mitchell Memorial Lecture 2010, Kate Grenville Australian Author Official Web Site online at http://kategrenville.com/node/57 (accessed November 22, 2010). David Marr points to a random dozen titles by way of stressing the indebtedness of authors: David Marr, ‘The Mitchell’ in State Library of

8 author and journalist David Marr observes, it is all but impossible to read about Australia, the Pacific and the Antarctic without incurring debts of gratitude to the library established by Mitchell’s bequest.37 While Governor Bashir acknowledged Mitchell’s achievement, little more is known about him and his motives beyond repeated anecdotes that mostly spring from a limited number of eyewitness sources dating from his last years. Anne Robertson identifies these sources as booksellers Fred Wymark (who rescued the Donaldson papers) and James R. Tyrrell (1875-1961), besides the Principal Librarian of the then Public Library of New South Wales (1893-1905), Harry Charles Lennox Anderson (1853-1924), with whom Mitchell had an ambivalent relationship.38 Other sources relied on were the journalist and historian Arthur Jose (1863-1934) and Sydney-based literary and art critic Bertram Stevens (1872-1922).39 It is ironic that Mitchell is repeatedly portrayed according to these few same sources. He single-handedly collected the documentary history of Australia, yet accounts of his own history largely come from these few observers. They were largely friends, and considerably younger men (such as Jose, Stevens, Tyrrell and Wymark), who drew their impressions of an aged Mitchell near the end of his life or after he died; they could only be deferential to the elderly and respected public benefactor who was held in awe.40 Consequently, a picture of Mitchell has developed that is based on these limited accounts. Thus he is presented as a passionate collector who collected everything,41 who was a legendary monomaniac,42 bad-tempered and solitary43, a

New South Wales, One Hundred, A Tribute to the Mitchell Library (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2010), 43. 37 Marr, ‘The Mitchell’, 43. 38 Robertson, Treasures, 118. Fred V. G. Wymark, Reminiscences of D. S. M, 1939, ML Am 121/1/1-3; James R. Tyrrell David Scott Mitchell: A Reminiscence (Sydney Sunnybrook Press 1936); idem., Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1952); H. C. L. Anderson, unpublished manuscript, MLA1830. 39 Arthur Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, The Lone Hand (September 2, 1907), 465-470; Bertram Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, The Lone Hand (October 1, 1907), 581-585. 40 Stevens alludes to the fact that Mitchell could only be a puzzle to men like himself, coming from the different era of the earlier colonial period that Mitchell was born into. This is how Mitchell was portrayed; this is how the myth about Mitchell as the ‘enigmatic’ or ‘unknowable man’ began. Bertram Stevens, David Scott Mitchell 1919 with an article on the Mitchell Library by Bernard Stevens extracted from The Lone Hand 1 October 1901, ML C373, 1. Jones, ‘Relations’, 26.; Brodsky, Phantom Book Shops, 52; Fletcher, Obsession, 21. 41 Anne Robertson, ‘David Scott Mitchell: A Passion for Collecting’, Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 2, no. 3 (September 1989): 121. Robertson’s estimation (written when Robertson was Mitchell Library Manuscripts Librarian) was published before Mitchell’s collection had

9 ‘wealthy recluse’44, whose collection ‘was the hub of his existence’45, ‘but [was] a poor keeper of paper records who depended entirely on his excellent memory to know what he had in his collection’46, and left little beyond his collection. Going beyond this, consideration of the larger historical picture of cultural philanthropy during Mitchell’s lifetime requires appreciating terms like ‘benefaction’ and ‘philanthropy’ which have a long history of altering use and understanding. They are overlaid with reference to charity and beliefs about Christian duty and almsgiving. By the mid-nineteenth century the terms ‘philanthropy’ and ‘charity’ were interchangeable. Mitchell’s family was steeped in a Scottish culture of giving and social responsibility. Literature that Mitchell owned gave him further examples. Consequently understanding of Mitchell requires knowledge of his extended Anglo- Scottish family and the legacy he inherited from them. Familiarity with this background and the literature that went with it provides entry into their lives particularly into their ‘private’ world in the way that critical theorist Mark Poster suggests is possible, thereby allowing a ‘reading’ of this world that might otherwise elude consideration.47 To Poster, the emotional structures of discontinuous family history can inform historians; its configuration of behaviours and attitudes, each with its own emotional pattern, can contribute to the knowledge of social history. How the voluntary principle was transported and applied by the Scots who immigrated to Australia has yet to be better understood. In Australia, Mitchell was among a number of philanthropic individuals (many of them of Scottish background) who figured prominently in their generosity during the three decades from the 1880s. Rich purses were directed to educational purposes by Francis Ormond (1829–1889)

been fully identified, as was completed in 2007. More correctly, Mitchell collected selectively: see chapter 3, 7-8. 42 Jones, ‘Relations’, 25. 43 Peter Biskup with the assistance of Doreen M. Goodman, Libraries in Australia (Wagga Wagga, N.S.W.: Centre for Information Studies, 1994), 45.; John Wright, ‘The solitary collector [David Mitchell started collecting books as a boy, a collection which eventually became the Mitchell Library]’, Australian, March 18, 2006, Review 14.; Wallace Kirsop, Books for Colonial Readers, 17, 83 Note 1. 44 Brian H. Fletcher, A Passion for the Past. Writers of Australian History in New South Wales 1900-1938 (Sydney: Royal Australian Historical Society, 1990), 2. 45 Jones, ‘Relations’, 36. 46 Maryanne Larkin, ‘David Scott Mitchell and Australia’s First Book’, Margin, no.72 (July-August 2007): 31. 47 Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Pluto Press, 1978), xii, xvii. He also argues that the philanthropic zeal of late nineteenth century liberals needs to be studied and that the history remains to be written of the effort of the philanthropic bourgeoisie at reformism, 194.

10 and Sir Samuel Wilson (1832-1895) in Melbourne; Sir Walter Watson Hughes (1803- 1887) and Robert Barr Smith in Adelaide; and John Challis (1806-1880), Thomas Walker, and Sir Peter Russell (1816-1905) in Sydney (Appendix 11).48 Fin-de-siècle initiatives and directions were still shaped by private philanthropy which could ‘lever state action’.49 This was the case with Mitchell’s endowment. Mitchell announced his gift in 1898, bequeathed £30,000 to create the Mitchell Library in 1901, and a further £40,000 to create the Mitchell Library Endowment Fund in 1905. He expedited the erection of a badly needed building to house Sydney’s public library. He made it a condition of his gift that the State build this, forcing it to remedy its neglect of the needs of the reading public. Doing this met inadequate state support to advance the beginnings of a modern public library in Sydney.50 In the Australian context, Mitchell was foundational to the development of librarianship and library scholarship as he was to historical scholarship and other fields of Australian studies. This occurred after his death through his bequest. Mitchell illustrates the pivotal role played by private support in shaping and developing public institutions through the turn of the century and the uneasy way in which private support and government related to each other over this. Much like the actors in the narratives by Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Margaret Menninger, Dorothee Wimmer, Andrea Geddes-Poole and David Nasaw, Mitchell holds a central position in the history of fin-de-siècle philanthropy in Australia (particularly of its cultural philanthropy) by supporting an institution that became an instrument of national culture.51 Like the northern-hemisphere philanthropists whom Helen Meller speaks

48 Therese Radic, ‘The unwelcome guest: Francis Ormond and the political origins of the Ormond Chair’ in Brenton Broadstock, ed., Aflame With Music: 100 Years of Music at the University of Melbourne. (Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Studies in Australian Music, University of Melbourne, 1996): 11-17; Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary history of the University of Melbourne (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1957), 51; For Barr-Smith see Malcolm Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008),165. Also, Prest, Wakefield, 164; For Russell see www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Sydney/HistoryAndArchives/SydneyHistory/SocialHistory/PNRuss ellAndCo.asp (accessed November 12, 2010). 49 Martin Daunton, ‘Introduction’ in Martin Daunton, ed., The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2005), 21. 50 Frank Murcott Bladen, Historical Notes: Commemorative of the Building of the Mitchell Wing (Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales, 1906). The last eight years of Mitchell’s life were spent in patiently leading government to appreciate his gift. 51 Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science, The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); Margaret Menninger, Art and Civic Patronage in Leipzig, 1848-1914 (PhD diss., Harvard, 1988); Dorothee Wimmer, ‘Bremen – Berlin – Weimar, Cooperation between German art collectors and museum directors c.1900’, Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 2 (2009); Andrea Geddes-

11 about, Mitchell’s ‘contributions had lasting significance but grew out of the particular time and [their] own identities in the larger context of society’.52 Although attention has been given to the history of particular museums in recent years, no single collective analysis of Australia’s urban cultural institutions during their nineteenth century foundations has been published in similar fashion to Sally Kohlstedt’s review of Australian Museums of Natural History in terms of public priorities and scientific initiatives.53 All the major museums in Australia were established in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, with the exception of the Australian Museum (of natural history) begun in Sydney in the 1820s that was linked to the Australian Subscription Library (which Mitchell’s father worked hard to maintain).54 No research has been published that traces the paths by which cultural institutions became established before and shortly after Federation, nor outlines the cultural politics involved and how the philanthropy that underpinned their establishment was inscribed with the dominant values and ideas of the times. Social and cultural detail of the foundations of Australia’s urban cultural institutions is limited to the institutional histories that exist for each institution. These are generally descriptive catalogues of institutional achievement in the manner that Edmund La Touche Armstrong (1864-1946), librarian and secretary to the trustees of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria, wrote in 1906 about his institution.55 International library historiography has similarly demonstrated the need to

Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890-1939 (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1986); David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). 52 Helen Meller, ‘Imagining culture and the city in planning history: some reflections on the public and private’, Planning Perspectives 24, no.1 (January 2009): 99–115. 53 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘Australian Museums of Natural History: Public Priorities and Scientific Initiatives in the 19th Century’, Historical Records of Australian Science 6 (1983): 1-29; No scholarship has been published along the lines of Roy Macleod’s scholarship in the history of science and public policy or the body of work on the ‘theory of interests’ by scholars in the sociology of scientific knowledge: Roy Macleod, ‘Whigs and Savants: Reflections on the Reform Movement in the Royal Society, 1830-48 in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780-1859, eds. Ian Inkster & Jack Morrell (London: Hutchinson, 1983). Also, Roy M. Macleod, Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). 54 For the Australian Museum: R. Strahan, Rare and Curious Specimens. An Illustrated History of the Australian Museum 1827-1979 (Sydney: The Australian Museum, Sydney, 1979); With this can be read Thomas Storie Dixson, Australian Museum, Sydney: Lecture on its Origin, Growth and Work (Sydney: The Trustees, 1919). 55 View from the perspective of Melbourne is offered by Edmund La Touche Armstrong, The Book of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria: 1856-1906 (Melbourne: Printed for the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria, 1906); Galbally, The Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.

12 move away from isolated narrative accounts of individual philanthropic acts, and instead attempt an ‘evaluation of how public library development fitted into a normative social culture of philanthropy’.56 Inadequate research in Australia results in confused views of generosity when it seems that private support for cultural engagement was far from falling short. Tasmania offers one example. Heather Gaunt shows there existed in Tasmania alone four library benefactors who greatly enriched that state’s collections between their deaths from 1851 to 1933.57 Philanthropy Australia singles Mitchell out as significant for leaving his donation ‘in the form of cultural items, rather than money’.58 Portrayal of Mitchell as a book-loving recluse fails to account for the depth and complexity of his personal and historical links to philanthropy. Putting him under the microscope could shed light on these. It may illuminate in turn the culture of philanthropy in nineteenth century Australia in general and the history of cultural philanthropy in Sydney in particular.

56 Heather Gaunt, ‘Mr Walker’s books, or how the Tasmanian Public Library founded a collection and forgot a donor, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers & Proceedings 54, no. 3 (December 2007): 122; Mary Niles Maack, ‘International Dimensions of Library History: Leadership and Scholarship, 1978-1998’, Libraries & Culture 35, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 66-76.; J. D. A. Collier, ‘Library Development in Australia, The Australian Quarterly 17, No. 3 (September 1945): 105-110; Kylie Mirmohamadi, ‘Melbourne’s sites of reading: Putting the colonial woman reader in her place’, History Australia 6, no. 2 (2009): 38.1-38.18; Lishi Kwasitsu, ‘The availability and use of books in libraries in nineteenth century Bendigo, Australia’, Libraries & Culture 27, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 143- 176; John Levett, The Tasmanian Public Library 1849-1869, the Rise and Fall of a Colonial Institution (M. Lib. diss., Monash University, 1984). 57 Gaunt points to James Ebenezer Bicheno (1785-1851) (with his offer of 1,900 books to the Library for £300 in 1851); William Robert Giblin (1840-1887); James Backhouse Walker (1841-1899); and William Walker (1860-1933). 58 Meachen, ‘Collectors’.

13 Chapter Two Charting knowledge: Literature Review

‘Unquestionably the largest purely Australian library in the world’, exulted the Premier of New South Wales to the public crowd thronged around him. Notable in the mass were many personalities who were prominent in the State’s cultural and public life. They gathered on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 September 1906 to watch him lay the foundation stone of a new Public Library. Joseph Carruthers set the huge freestone block faced with an engraved inscription. This read that he was acting for the donor of the Library, David Scott Mitchell, who could not be there. He announced ‘that Mr. Mitchell presented his library to the people on the sole condition that it should be well housed, and that he had now intimated his intention of endowing it with a considerable portion of his wealth, so that it would continue to expand after he would be unable to personally superintend its growth.’ The crowd cheered when he paid tribute to Mr Mitchell. He voiced the hope that following Mitchell’s example ‘handsome donations to the State by rich men would prove infectious and that book- lovers would, rather than have their collections broken up after years of toil, present them to the National Library’ to be built. ‘Mr Mitchell’s endeavour had been to make the library so complete that students of Australian history would have to come to Sydney for material, as even now they were coming from the universities of Europe and the United States to study at first hand our peculiar social and political development and our marvellous flora and fauna.’ Both the path to achieving the building and the collection it would house had a long history. It was for this reason that the Premier called the building one of ‘high purpose’ about which he said, ‘for our age and population we have no cause to be ashamed’.1 In this way he obliquely referred to what is acknowledged today as Australia’s ‘greatest cultural legacy’.2 When speaking about Mitchell’s responsibility for this, Premier Carruthers remarked that ‘the biographical details available about our benefactor are very meagre, owing to his absolute disregard of self, and refusal to grant any one an

1 ‘Mitchell Library Foundation Stone Laid’, SMH, 12 September 1906, 9. 2 State Library of New South Wales, ‘David Scott Mitchell and the Mitchell Library’, ONE Hundred (2010) online at http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/exhibitions/2010/onehundred/100-years/DS- Mitchell-and-the-Mitchell-Library.htm (accessed October 9, 2010).

14 interview, or to discuss anything more personal than the library which he wishes to present to his native land – the one great object of his life.’ A century later, despite Mitchell being known as ‘the father of Australia’s most famous library’ and despite the magnitude of his gift, the details of his history and gift still remain obscure.3 Historian Brian H. Fletcher, author of the history of the Mitchell Library, says that this is because ‘the documentary material needed to depict Mitchell in the round is unfortunately lacking.’4 Accounts provide little more sense of him and the context of his achievement than they did a century ago. Until recently, no serious attempt has been made to comprehensively contextualize his history and what lay behind his generosity.5 This literature survey outlines the current state of research into Mitchell in three parts. After considering previous published views about Mitchell, it explains how biographic study of Mitchell entails focus on philanthropy and notes the issues that are necessarily entailed in such study. This means outlining conceptions of philanthropy. It also means appreciating the issues that are related to Mitchell’s history and the literature associated with these. These issues are inseparable from any study of Mitchell’s significance to the cultural life of this country.

2.1 Views about Mitchell An example of preeminent public benefaction of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia and of the importance of private philanthropy to Australia’s cultural wealth comes from Sir Redmond Barry (1813-1880) who was central to nineteenth-century Melbourne’s cultural and philanthropic life. Peter Ryan writes that few benefactors could compare with Barry.6 Ann Galbally calls Barry a ‘cultural commissar’ for whom books and reading were the twin cornerstones of treasure and solace throughout Barry’s life.7 He was so ‘formed by his reading that he

3 Malcolm Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 2nd ed. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 231. 4 Fletcher, Obsession, 7. 5 Chanin, Book Life. This book sprang from research into this study into cultural philanthropy, as explained on p.3 of this study. 6 Ann Galbally, University of Melbourne Museum of Art, The First Collections, the Public Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1850's and 1860's, University Gallery, the University of Melbourne Museum of Art 14 May-15 July 1992 (Parkville, Vic.: The Museum, 1992); Ryan, Redmond Barry, 1, 20, 40. 7 Galbally, Barry, 83, 92.

15 wished others to have such an advantage’.8 Yet his inability to share or relinquish executive control put him at odds with his times. To Galbally Barry’s distinction rests in his unparalleled contribution to cultural patronage, and for being responsible for establishing a ‘uniquely antipodean culture in Melbourne.’9 Her account sprang from an earlier study of public patronage of the arts in colonial Victoria; while it is a biography rather than a study of philanthropy, she established that Barry’s drive to establish the widest base for community participation in cultural activities was fuelled by his belief in their socially adhesive qualities and importance in establishing a new community.10 Significantly, both Ryan and Galbally observe how the picture of their subject developed differently from the image they held when each began their study. The truth about Barry, notes Ryan, is more interesting than the nowadays hackneyed inventions commonly accepted.11 Benefactors like Barry believed in the importance of scientific and cultural repositories (like museums and libraries) as tools that would advance colonial development and civilization. The desire to edify the local populace was a feature of these bodies that were ‘recast as educational institutions’, as Susan Sheets-Pyenson shows in her study of colonial natural history museums that were developed as an aspect of the ‘Museum Movement’ that gripped the late-Victorian world.12 In the context of the Victorian era, philanthropic provision of ‘culture’ was among the wide range of reformist activities that many middle-class social activists and practical reformers supported. Benefactors throughout the Victorian world envisaged that these ‘learned’ institutions would promote their region.13 In Australia, these cultural institutions were associated with nation-state prestige and civic pride, aspiring (as Felton intended) ‘to instil “feelings of admiration, respect and confidence”.’14 Examples abound of philanthropists at work during Mitchell’s lifetime. Among these individual profiles is Paul Pickering’s account of John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878) and his attempts between 1847 and 1852 to persuade Manchester liberals

8 Galbally, Barry, 93. 9 Galbally, Barry, 2. 10 Galbally, Barry, 87. 11 Ryan, Barry, 2. 12 Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals, 4, 16. 13 John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire, Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 133-136; David McKitterick, ‘Libraries, Knowledge and Public Identity’ in The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2005), 288. 14 Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals, 46.

16 among others to support his scheme to grow cotton in today’s Queensland.15 Later examples come from Roslyn Russell and Fayette Gosse. Russell considers arts patron Eliezer (Levi) Montefiore (1820-1894), who shared Poynter’s faith in the civilizing influences of works of art. He became one of the original trustees for administering the funds voted by parliament towards forming the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, which opened in September 1880.16 Fayette Gosse assembled the private letters between Thomas Elder’s partner, Robert Barr Smith (1824-1915), and his wife Joanna (who was Elder’s sister). These give an idea of the connections between Scots-born entrepreneurs made wealthy by South Australia’s rich Wallaroo and Moonta mines. However, they largely picture their domesticity and Gosse admits that emphasis on family life is too narrow a portrayal because it offers little insight into Robert Barr Smith’s philanthropic impulse.17 Her anthology followed closely after the social and architectural history of the Barr Smith estate, Torrens Park, near Mitcham in suburban Adelaide.18 In this account, the two chapters considering Barr Smith’s philanthropy are brief; largely dealing with architectural heritage, they offer little insight into philanthropic intent. One covers philanthropy by family members into recent times and focus is limited to Adelaide and family connections. No matter that ‘Elder’s was the first major bequest to an Australian art museum’.19 Analysis of what the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes as Barr Smith’s ‘legendary’ philanthropy remains buried. Likewise with histories of the institutions he established (including the University of

15 Paul A. Pickering, ‘The highway to comfort and independence: a case study of radicalism in the British world’, History Australia 5, no.1 (April 2008): 1-14. 16 Roslyn Russell, ‘Eliezer Montefiore from Barbados to Sydney’, National Library of Australia News 19, no. 3 (December 2008): 12. Known as Levi Montefiore, his wife was cousin of the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1884) who was renowned world-wide for his help to oppressed Jewish communities. 17 Joanna Barr Smith, Joanna and Robert: the Barr Smiths’ life in letters, 1853-1919, ed. Fayette Gosse (Adelaide: Barr Smith Press, 1996); Dirk van Dissel, ‘Smith, Robert Barr (1824 - 1915)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 153-154. Also, Wilfrid Prest, ed., The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (Kent Town, S. A.: Wakefield Press, 2001), 69-70. The flame of family history has been kept alive: Lady Mary Downer, Joanna Barr Smith (North Sydney, N.S.W.: Mary MacKillop Place Museum, 2003). 18 Ken Preiss & Pamela Oborn, The Torrens Park Estate, A Social and Architectural History (Adelaide: Printed by Gillingham Printers, 1991). The estate belonged to Yorke Peninsula copper miner Walter Watson Hughes from 1866 before passing on to his financier Robert Barr Smith in 1874. 19 Menz, ‘Bequests’, 114. Elder’s munificence established the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

17 Adelaide); these account for the structures that his generosity endowed without analysis of the philanthropic impulse.20 The accounts of the Barr Smith family indicate that most published accounts of individual Australian philanthropists are inadequate, some being no more than family history.21 Mark Lyons, who published the first comprehensive study of Australia's third sector, rightly indicates a lack of adequate literature.22 Historical reflection on Australian philanthropists is largely gained from unpublished theses such as Barbara Lemon’s survey of women’s philanthropy and Caroline Clemente’s discussion of the support given to artists in Gold-Rush Victoria between 1840 and 1870.23 Clemente focuses on the contribution made to the culture of Melbourne then by medical practitioner Dr Godfrey Howitt (1800-1873) and his wife Phoebe. Quaker arrivals from the Midlands and with close ties to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, they show that philanthropy in Australia was practiced within the wider context of philanthropism at the time. The New Zealand collectors and library benefactors Sir George Grey (1812- 1898), Thomas Morland Hocken (1836-1910) and Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull (1868-1918) were active at the same time as Mitchell. These collectors knew of each other; Hocken and Mitchell corresponded, and may even have met when Hocken visited Sydney.24 Much of the literature that exists on these bibliophiles dates from recent New Zealand research.25 This fits within literature on other library benefactors

20 Susan Woodburn, The Founding of a University: the First Decade of the University of Adelaide (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 1983). 21 Wilsie Short, Benjamin Short 1833-1912: A Migrant with a Mission, Grandfather’s Story (Kensington, N. S. W.: UNSW Press, 1994); Edward W. Northwood, The Life and Work of William Harper 1792-1836 (Kirrawee, N.S.W.: E. W. Northwood, 1999). 22 Mark Lyons, ‘The history of non-profit organisations in Australia: an overview’, Third Sector Review 4, no. 2 (1998): 24; Mark Lyons, The Third Sector: The Contribution of Nonprofit and Cooperative Enterprises in Australia (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2001). 23 Barbara Lemon, ‘In her gift: activism and altruism in Australian women’s philanthropy 1880- 2005’, (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2008); idem., ‘Within her gift: an historical overview of women’s philanthropy’, Australian Philanthropy, no. 71 (Summer 2008): 4-5; Caroline Clemente, The Private Face of Patronage: the Howitts, Artistic and Intellectual Philanthropists in Early Melbourne Society (M. A. diss., University of Melbourne, 2005). 24 Sir George Gray was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Geographic Society of Australasia, which Mitchell belonged to. Royal Geographic Society of Australasia, New South Wales. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society of Australasia, New South Wales 1891-2 (1893). 25 Donald Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2006); A. G. Hocken, Dr. Hocken of Dunedin: a life (Oamaru, N.Z.: East Riding Press, 2008); T. M. Hocken (Foreward by Donald Kerr), A Gift to the Dominion, (Dunedin, N.Z.: Otakou Press, 2007); E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr Hocken

18 both in Australia (as by Wallace Kirsop on Sir Charles Nicholson (1808-1903)) and elsewhere.26 Collectors and collections of particular benefactors have been studied, as have their histories.27 Yet Mitchell has escaped historical appraisal. This is despite his being ranked with the greatest bibliophiles of his time. National Library of Australia Manuscript Librarian (1966-2006) Graeme Powell ranks Mitchell with Britain’s single-minded John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe (1740-1804), whose St. James’s Square library was the most valuable in Britain; and Richard Heber (1773-1833), who amassed one of the largest collections of rare books in the areas of early English poetical and dramatic literature owned by an individual. Powell ranks Mitchell with them, as ‘extremely wealthy men’ who ‘inherited great wealth and seem to have done little in their lives except search for and acquire books and other works on a grand scale’.28 David Walker places Mitchell’s great personal library at ‘the pinnacle of the collecting hierarchy’ (Appendix 2).29 Customarily, accounts refer to the leadership that Mitchell took, and was respected for taking, in collecting Australiana. Mitchell’s interest in Australiana was both ahead of yet also part of collecting trends in his day. The prevailing taste among colonial private collections up to the 1890s – at least in art – was for foreign pictures (namely of English landscape, old master pictures and to a lesser extent modern figure pieces). Exposure to art works was considered an important factor in the ‘civilising’ process, however this process generally required importation (with German art being particularly popular). Mitchell focused on Australian material. It is remarkable also that Mitchell never desisted from collecting, even despite the long drought of the late 1880s, and the severe downturn of the 1890s. The depression of the 1890s impacted significantly on even the wealthiest of collectors.

and his Fellow Collectors (Dunedin, N. Z.: University of Otago Press, 1961); idem., Alexander Turnbull: His Life, His Circle, His Collections (Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, 1974). 26 Wallace Kirsop, ‘Sir Charles Nicholson and his book collections’, Australian Library Journal 56, nos. 3-4 (November 2007): 418-427; Mary Kingsbury, ‘Book Collector, Bibliographer, and Benefactor of Libraries: Sir William Osler’, The Journal of Library History (1974-1987) 16, no. 1, Libraries & Culture I (Winter, 1981): 187-198. 27 Rachel Barrowman, ‘A Labour of Love: Dr. Hocken and his Collection’ in Kā taoka Hākena, Treasures from the Hocken collections, eds. Stuart Strachan & Linda Tyler (Dunedin, N.Z.: Otago University Press, 2007), 8-19; Peter Gibbons, ‘Early castings for a Canon: Some 1920s Perceptions of New Zealand Literary Achievements’, Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL 23, Part 1 (2005): 99. 28 Graeme Powell, ‘The Great Bookmen E.A. Petherick and J. A. Ferguson’ in Remarkable Occurances, The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years 1901-2001 ed. Peter Cochrane (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001), 59. 29 David Walker, ‘Studying the Neighbours, The Asian Collections’ in Cochrane, ibid., 173.

19 Particular example comes from the experience of F. W. Armytage (1838-1912) whose art collection of ‘modern pictures was the most important assembled in Victoria in the nineteenth century’; it was dispersed by Christies in London in May 1897.30 Curiously little attention has been given to how Mitchell came to own or acquire material. Maryanne Larkin has considered Mitchell’s ownership of Australia’s first book, the rare New South Wales General Standing Orders (1802). Larkin’s article is largely descriptive, written when she was Mitchell Library’s Senior Manuscripts Librarian. Larkin corrects errors from earlier focus on Australian publications written by bibliographer and omnivorous book collector Sir John Ferguson (1881-1969). Larkin also corrects errors in a biographical sketch of Mitchell that was written by librarian Anne Robertson for a publication that the State Library of New South Wales issued to mark Australia’s bicentenary in 1988.31 David Jones refers to Mitchell acquiring salvaged material from Sydney booksellers. From the firm of Angus and Robertson, David Angus (1855-1901) rescued a parcel of Sir Stuart Donaldson’s (1812-1867) papers from being burnt as rubbish; and Fred V. G. Wymark (1872-1942) turned up sketches by John Gould (1804-1881).32 The Sydney-based social democrat journalist and author Richard Hall (1937-2003), who wrote widely on crime, espionage, politics, history and biography, considers the erotic material in Mitchell’s collection.33 H. G. Kaplan’s census to identify and enumerate fifteenth century printed books held in Australia does not

30 Gerard Vaughan, ‘The Armytage Collection: Taste in Melbourne in the late Nineteenth Century’ in Ann Galbally and Margaret Plant, Studies in Australian Art (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Department of Fine Arts, 1978), 35-44. Vaughan considers Armytage to be the most sophisticated collector in late nineteenth century Melbourne; he notes that Armytage maintained a large art library: 36. 31 Larkin, ‘David Scott Mitchell and Australia’s First Book’. Although this item was featured in the State Library of New South Wales 2010 exhibition, One Hundred, the only mention made to Mitchell in relation to this book was that he bequeathed it in 1907: One Hundred, The Exhibits, http://www.onehundred.sl.nsw.gov.au/100-objects/The-Exhibits.aspx. (accessed November 6, 2010); Sir John Alexander Ferguson, Bibliography of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941-1969); Anne Robertson, ‘David Scott Mitchell: A Passion for Collecting’, in Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales: the Australiana Collections (Sydney: Collins in association with the State Library of New South Wales, 1988). 32 David J. Jones, ‘Friendly Relations: Anderson, Mitchell and the book trade’, Australian Library Journal 34 no. 3 (August 1985), 25; NSW Legislative Assembly, 1900, 123. Wymarck, who started with Angus and Robertson as an office boy eventually became a director of the firm. For Mitchell’s debt to Wymarck see Martin Lyons and John Arnold, eds. A History of the Book in Australia 1891- 1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 140. Sir Stuart Alexander Donaldson (1812-1867) was first Premier of New South Wales, in 1856. 33 Richard Hall, ‘Revealed: Mitchell’s library of dirty books’, SMH, September 7, 1991, 42.

20 record provenances.34 Nor does Keith Sinclair’s descriptive catalogue investigate provenance (beyond identifying that Mitchell’s copy of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Historia eccleciastica (1479) bore the label of Sydney bookseller Angus & Robertson).35 Maggie Patton’s survey of rare books in the State Library of New South Wales notes that Mitchell collected ‘early printed books, Elizabethan drama and eighteenth century fiction’ but admits that nineteenth century collections (like that from Mitchell) remain ‘hidden’.36 Mitchell’s bookplate graces the cover to Charles Stitz’s survey of noted Australian book collectors, which the Canberra Times hailed as the potential ‘DNB (Dictionary of National Biography) of Australian bibliophilic history.’37 This declares Mitchell’s prominence among Australian bibliophiles (and evokes his being titled in 1973 by Isadore Brodsky as the ‘prince of Australiana collectors’).38 Stitz says that Mitchell’s collection remains ‘unrivalled in its field and is one of the great national collections of the world.’39 However Stitz’s entry on Mitchell only offers previously published detail.40 That these few references to Mitchell come largely from librarians rather than from historians is surprising given that his collection laid the foundation upon which Australian history came to be written through the twentieth century. In discussing Australian historiography Frank Farrell notes the significance of important figures in the general development of Australian colonial writing and historiography in the mid- to late nineteenth century.41 He singles out the three-volume history published in 1883 by Mitchell’s uncle George William Rusden (1810-1903) as among the first complete

34 H. G. Kaplan, A First Census of Incunabula in Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales, 1966). 35 Keith Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969), 106-116. For details of the Eusebius see item 43: 106. 36 Maggie Patton. ‘An audible voice of the past: the rare printed collections of the State Library of New South Wales’, Australian Library Journal 58, no. 2 (May 2009): 143. 37 Colin Steele, ‘Great Australian collector’, The Canberra Times, 11 June 2011, 30.; Charles Stitz, ed., Australian Book Collectors (Bendigo: Bread Street Press in association with The Australian Book Auction Records, 2010). 38 Isadore Brodsky, Phantom Book Shops, 43. 39 Echoing Richardson, see note 7; Stitz, Book Collectors, 178. 40 Stitz, Book Collectors, 175-179. 41 Frank Farrell, Themes in Australian History: Questions, Issues and Interpretation in an Evolving Historiography (Kensington, N.S.W.: NSWU Press, 1990), 84; G. W. Rusden, History of Australia (London: Chapman and Hall; Melbourne: G. Robertson, 1883) (DSM990.1/54A1). A second edition was issued in 1897. Farrell also notes the work of James Bonwick (1817-1906) and David Blair (1820- 99).

21 histories of Australasia without mention of Rusden’s connection to Mitchell nor the sources from which Rusden drew. Brian Fletcher refers to Mitchell among businessmen (like his friend Alfred Lee) who ‘did much to promote Australian history.’42 Wallace Kirsop claims that ‘we know what David Scott Mitchell’s private library looked like’ as photographs taken after Mitchell’s death show us how it was housed.43 Yet detail of the contents of Mitchell’s library has escaped attention although, as Kirsop indicates, ‘To seize a library in situ can be revealing.’ Not only do we lack knowledge about Mitchell and the reasons behind his generosity, but published details of his collection are also scant. Analysis of individual collecting history runs thin in Australia. Wallace Kirsop pointed to the lack in Australia of contemporary examples ‘that map the highways and byways of bibliophilia’.44 By way of example elsewhere he pointed to Luther Farnham’s A Glance at Private Libraries (1855) that is devoted to the cultural and intellectual capital of the region of New England in America, just south of the state of Maine. Kirsop notes that this genre ‘has had much less currency in Australia.’45 In 2005 he found it hard to think of similar Australian examples beyond a 1960s reprint of descriptive pieces in the Age. These discuss the libraries of some leading members of the Victorian Branch of the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia: H. Boyd Graham (1891-1966); brothers Ivo (1895-1975) and Rollo Hammet (1905-1994); and Ian McLaren (1912-2000). Kirsop highlights the challenge that Australian researchers face to recover book-collecting history from ‘a wide range of manuscript and printed documents’.46 This could account for there being few studies of Australian collectors, although accounts of individual collectors feature in northern hemisphere historiography. Some accounts of bibliophilists like John Carter’s essays reflect on

42 Fletcher, Australian History, 108. 43 Kirsop, ‘Foreward’, i. David Scott Mitchell, Selection of photographs of his residence at 17 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst N.S.W., ML SV1/ResMit/1,6,7-V1/Res/Mit/ 1a, 6b, 7a, 9a. 44 Wallace Kirsop, ‘Foreward’, 1; Luther Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries, Introd., Annotated Roger E. Stoddard (Weston, Mass.: M & S Press, 1991); See also Roger E. Stoddard, Abundant Bibliophiles: Hubbard Winslow Bryant on the Private Libraries of Portland 1863-1864, preface Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. (Portland: The Baxter Society, Twentieth Anniversary, 2004). 45 Kirsop, ‘Foreward’, i. 46 Kirsop, ‘Foreward’, ii. Kirsop refers to Stuart Sayers, Melbourne’s Book Collectors: A Series of Articles Reprinted from ‘The Age’ Literary Supplement (Melbourne: The Age, 1960).

22 the way that book collecting follows fashions.47 Beyond book collectors, many studies of individual collectors are biographical in their form, situating them in the context and culture of their milieu.48 Collecting historiography aside, expectations that book history would identify details about Mitchell also remain disappointing. Appraisal of Mitchell is wanting despite excellent work on books, bookmen, libraries and book culture throughout Australia’s early history. Robert Dixon, Nathan Garvey, Wallace Kirsop, Martyn Lyons and Elizabeth Webby are among Australian scholars who have developed appreciation for Australia’s history of books, readers and publishing.49 However beyond them, secondary literature on Australia’s book collectors or book history has yet to grow.50 Perhaps this is not surprising when book history is still a relatively new form of interdisciplinary inquiry that, as Michael F. Suarez has pointed out, ‘has yet to develop historiographical understandings adequate to the complexities of the questions it typically seeks to answer.’51

47 For general introductions see William Baker and Kenneth Womack, eds., Nineteenth-century British Book-collectors and Bibliographers (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1997). Example of an individual book collector studied biographically is: A. N. L. Munby, Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillips (London: Constable, 1967). John Carter, Books and Book Collectors (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956), 117-127. 48 A recent example is David Cannadine’s biography of American tycoon Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937): David Cannadine, Mellon, An American Life (New York: Random House, 2006). 49 Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 (Cambridge; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Nathan Garvey, The Celebrated George Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay (Potts Point, N. S. W.: Hordern House, 2008); Wallace Kirsop, ‘The State of the Discipline: Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research’, Book History 1, (1998): 283-303; idem., Books for Colonial Readers: the Nineteenth-century Australian Experience (Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand in association with the Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, 1995); idem., Towards a History of the Australian Book Trade (Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1969); D. H. Borchardt and W. Kirsop, eds., The Book in Australia: Essays Towards a Cultural & Social History (Melbourne: Australian Reference Publications in association with the Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, 1988); Martyn Lyons, A History of the Book in Australia (St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2001); Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, eds., Books & Empire: Textual Production, Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial Countries (Wagga Wagga, N. S. W.: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 2005); Elizabeth Webby, ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’ in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed., Elizabeth Webby (Oakleigh, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50-73, particularly 54-56. idem, Literature and the Reading Public in Australia, 1800-1850: A Study of the Growth and Differentiation of a Colonial Literary Culture during the Earlier Nineteenth Century (PhD diss, University of Sydney, 1974). 50 Wallace Kirsop, ‘Hunting for Australia's nineteenth-century book collectors’, Biblionews and Australian Notes and Queries, nos 355-356 (September-December 2007): 124-128. 51 Michael Felix Suarez, ‘Historiographical Problems and Possibilities in Book History and National Histories of the Book’, Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003-2004): 140-170. Useful introductions to book history come from: David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006); Leslie Howsam, Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

23 Most accounts of Mitchell dwell on his biography despite agreement that (as Premier Carruthers remarked in 1906) ‘little is known of Mitchell’s personal life’.52 Moreover, sources that are relied on for detail about Mitchell are limited. They fall into three typologies (Appendix 3). There are eyewitness sources, dating up to 1907; information from the State Library of New South Wales and the Press; and independent accounts. Library and press accounts overlap. They are largely repetitive and fall into three categories: (1) those dating up to the opening of the Mitchell Library building in 1910; (2) those dating from 1910-1940; and (3) those dating from 1940. Independent accounts largely draw on these reports for their sources. Over the years repetition of this material occurs.53 New insight has not appeared. Initially press accounts represented Mitchell as a philanthropic exemplar.54 Many are hyperbolic. One qualified observation came from Bernard Quaritch (1871- 1913), London-based international antiquarian and son of the legendary antiquarian Bernard Quaritch (1819-1899) who praised Mitchell’s foresight.55 Later repetitive accounts air little more than a stony silence around Mitchell – as historian and biographer Lionel Gilbert described the lack of deeper knowledge about him back in 1986.56 With anecdotal variations ‘according to whichever anecdotist one cares to rely upon’,57 Mitchell is generally perceived as an eccentric figure, a ‘benevolent oddball’.58 Indeed Mitchell is presented in the anthology The Sydney Scene as one of

52 Vanessa Meachen, ‘The Collectors, Celebrating 30 Years: Issue 10’, philanthropyOz Blog online at http://blog.philanthropy.org.au/2007/08/02/celebrating-30-years-issue-10/ (accessed February 23, 2011). 53 W. Patrick Strauss, ‘The Mitchell Library of Sydney, Australia’, The Library Quarterly 30, no. 2 (April 1960): 124; ‘David Mitchell, the Mitchell Library and Australiana’, Culture.Gov.Au online at http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/davidmitchell/ (accessed November 12, 2010); Angie Testa, ‘“Old Four Hours” Legacy of learning, The origins of the Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Australian Coin Review (2001): 20. In this article Joseph Carruthers (1857-1932), Premier of New South Wales (1904-1907) is erroneously called Premier J. H. Carters; the error was not corrected when the article was re-formatted seven years later: idem, ‘Old four hours’ legacy of learning’, Stamp News Australasia 55, no. 3 (March 2008): 46-48. 54 A representative sample of press accounts is contained in: Mitchell Library, The Mitchell Library: Press Cuttings (1909-1934) Vols.1-3 55 ‘The Mitchell Library, Congratulations from Mr Quaritch’, SMH, January 4, 1908, 12 56 Lionel Gilbert, ‘David Scott Mitchell and stony silence’, Biblionews and Australian Notes and Queries 11, no. 3 (September 1986): 67-72. Gilbert pointed to Mitchell’s grave lying unmarked for 80 years. This was restored in July 2007. 57 Jones, ‘Relations’, 25. Jones proffers Bertram Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 581-585; George Ferguson, Some Early Australian Bookmen (Canberra Australian National University Press, 1978); J. R. Tyrrell, Reminiscence; idem., Charles Barrett, ed., Across the Years (Melbourne, Seward, 1948); H.C.L. Anderson, unpublished manuscript, MLA1830); Fletcher, Obsession, 24-5. 58 Steve Meacham,, ‘The Book Collector: One Man’s Giant Quest’, SMH, June 9, 2007, 11

24 ‘Sydney’s characters’ after Abby Dabby, a George Street match-box seller; ‘Old Dad’, an easily provoked stone-thrower; and Paddy the Ram, an almost blind candle peddlar.59 Former Mitchell Librarians Gordon Richardson and Elizabeth Ellis offer the most incisive accounts of Mitchell that have been attempted so far.60 However, their accounts were delivered as lectures and are relatively brief, hence only broad-brush Mitchell’s history (somewhat like Robertson’s anecdotal narrative did) without wider context or analysis.61 Ann-Mari Jordens alludes to a historical context when noting that the Stenhouse library donated to the University of Sydney gave example to collectors like Mitchell.62 More recently, historian Brian Fletcher goes so far as to suggest that Mitchell used his wealth to ‘further his own ends’ and therefore ‘could hardly be labelled a philanthropist’.63 This discourse marginalizes Mitchell historically and obscures critical evaluation of his achievement. In such a narrative approach anecdote and fact can sometimes blur. Both the historian Georg G. Iggers and French philospher Paul Ricoeur have warned against the selective distortions of memory.64 Iggers points to memory being indifferent to reconstructing past reality, because ‘memory’ can have its own agenda. Ricoeur highlights that memory, which is ‘embedded in a collective setting that has historical roots’, is revived for the purpose of public anniversaries, rituals, and celebrations (as occurred with recent centenary focus on Mitchell and on the State Library of New South Wales). Ricoeur suggests that memory can reflect the agendas of interested parties more accurately than they do the person or events being commemorated. Iggers continues that memory recalls selectively, to ‘magnify specific heroic aspects of the past, and neglect others that do not fit into its ideology. In this way it contributes to the construction of collective identities. But these images of the past tend to conflict with the past as it really was.’ These views are pertinent when

59 Birch, Sydney Scene, 225-228. 60 G. D. Richardson, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, Descent 1, no. 2 (1961), ; idem, ‘Mitchell’, 260-261; Ellis, ‘Truth’, 83-100. 61 Richardson’s account was delivered at the T. D. Mutch Memorial Lecture for 1961, Ellis’ account was delivered as the John Alexander Ferguson Memorial Lecture for 2005. 62 Ann-Mari Jordens, The Stenhouse Circle, Literary Life in mid-Nineteenth Century Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 113. 63 Fletcher, Obsession, 35. 64 Georg G. Iggers, ‘A search for a post-modern theory of history’, History and Theory 48 (February 2009): 122-128; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Memory-Forgetting-History’ in Meaning and Representation in History, ed. introd., Jörn Rusen (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 11.

25 memory is enshrined institutionally, particularly when, as David Marr has asserted, the State Library of New South Wales – with custody of Mitchell’s collection – is the guard of the past.65 Casting Mitchell as an eccentric bowerbird escapes requiring further explanation about him and invests him with a fascination as a ‘man of some mystery’ that has captured and maintained public interest in him to this day.66 In collective memory, Mitchell has become the stuff of folklore, ‘some sort of Victorian precursor to Jay Gatsby and Citizen Kane’.67 Being type-cast as obsessive and reclusive (and with such stereotypes built around exaggeration and excesses) Mitchell fits the stereotypical image of a book-collector of the Victorian Age as an eccentric character. But how accurate is this portrayal when opinion about Mitchell, largely stemming from his last years, came to us from the Edwardian era which was keen to jettison what it could from the Victorian past, and when later modernist taste discounted Victoriana as kitsch?68 Revisionist histories of the Victorian Age have disproved Lytton Strachey’s declaration that too much is already known about Victorian times.69 Recent historians like Mathew Sweet have demonstrated that much detail about the Victorian past is incorrect, being twentieth century invention ‘and lazily accepted as truth ever since.’70 With ‘truth and fiction closely intertwined’ (as Elizabeth Ellis acknowledged) ‘in how the Mitchell Library came into being’, some sifting between actuality and legend is called for.71 There is need to give Mitchell the historical attention he deserves and square memory with fact. Mitchell merits study because a gap exists in knowledge about him. Mitchell’s importance rests in his generosity. A fuller understanding of his generosity can only become available from better knowledge of his biography. Knowledge of this has been elusive so far. As historians seek to understand human

65 David Marr, ‘Our memories are made of this’, SMH Spectrum, March 6, 2010, 6. For a view on the custodial responsibility of repositories like libraries see Brian M. Owens, ‘The Safeguarding of Memory: The Divine Function of the Librarian and Archivist’. Library & Archival Security 18, Issue 1 (2003): 9-41. 66 Steve Meacham, ‘The Book Collector’, 11. 67 ibid. 68 Mathew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber, 2001), xvii-xx, 229. 69 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, (Teddington, Middlesex: The Echo Library (1918)/2006), Preface. 70 Sweet, Inventing, 230. 71 Ellis, ‘Truth’, 84.

26 experiences in their social and cultural contexts, this research delves into Mitchell’s biography and seeks to learn about his philanthropic intentions and philanthropic history. It seeks to understand the philanthropic activity that Mitchell lived with. Through the prism of Mitchell’s experience there may also be opportunity to reflect on the course that philanthropism took during his lifetime, and how this interplayed with public culture in Sydney. Thus more complete knowledge of Mitchell may illuminate the larger historical picture of cultural philanthropy during his lifetime.

2.2 Conceptions of Philanthropy The practice of philanthropy (and charity) was so widespread in nineteenth- century cultural and social life, and philanthropists were so ubiquitous, that American Transcendentalist and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed ‘philanthropies and charities [for they] have a certain air of quackery’.72 Where once giving was linked to moral action and spurred by belief in bettering the world, self-interest lay behind much of the ostentatious philanthropy that Emerson railed against. Gaining social advantage lay behind this giving where once noble intentions had underpinned benefaction. Notwithstanding Emerson’s attack on ‘foolish philanthropists’, philanthropic activity was generally associated with social action. Initially it was seen as charitable assistance. By the later nineteenth-century this extended beyond charitable assistance into supporting cultural activity. It became associated with education and urban growth, such as when directed to libraries and museums. Where in earlier times philanthropy played a role in social modernization, similarly by late century it became part of cultural modernization.73 To this day, the term ‘philanthropy’, while ‘as old as civilization’, has no single agreed comprehensive definition and connotes several concepts with as many interpretations as there are theorists and a degree of overlap between them.74

72 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses, & Lectures (Boston: James Monroe, 1849), 261 (DSM 814.36). Emerson likened philanthropy to Calvinism; it was the ‘visible church’ of his generation: 338. See also, Ralph Waldo Emerson, pref. Thomas Carlyle, Essays (London: James Fraser, 1841), 43-90 on self-reliance. Emerson thought that ‘malice and vanity wore the coat of philanthropy’, 51; and that a philanthropist ‘spoiled’ conversation, 206. 73 M. Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy Charity and Society in Nineteenth Century Bristol (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1999), 1-12. 74 Mordechai Feingold, ‘Philanthropy, Pomp, and Patronage: Historical Reflections upon the Endowment of Culture’, Daedalus 116, no. 1(Winter 1987): 155.

27 Underpinning benevolence and philanthropy is ‘love of mankind’; the noun stems from the ancient Greek for love of mankind. Philanthropy or ‘giving behaviour’ is in essence ‘a form of love’; indeed historian Frank Prochaska suggests the history of philanthropy should be considered broadly as the history of kindness.75 Yet ‘giving’ refers to a wide variety of activities that are differentiated by the motivation behind them (as loosely interpreted in Appendix 5). Warren Ilchman, Stanley Katz and Edward Queen understand philanthropy as primarily ‘activities of voluntary giving and serving to others beyond one’s family’.76 Historian Kathleen D. McCarthy defines philanthropy as the giving of time, money and/or valuables for public benefit.77 Inherent in modern definitions of philanthropy (since the eighteenth century) is the concept of voluntary giving by an individual or group to promote the common good and improve the quality of life. In this regard, Victorian texts leave no doubt that the Victorian Age respected philanthropy as an attribute of equal stature as heroism and statesmanship.78 In Victorian understanding, philanthropy was a patriotic activity directed at bettering the well-being of one’s country.79 In short, philanthropy was part of the individual and collective ‘moral imagination’ of the Victorians.80 More recent scholars, without synoptic understanding of the term, have increasingly turned to its classical etymology and history. Sociologist Paul G. Schervish gets his meaning of philanthropy (as care and friendship) by tracing its roots to Aristotle and the Greek origin of the word, phileo (love or friendship), and

75 F. K. Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3, 1750- 1950, ed., F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I990), 362. 76 Warren F. Ilchman et al, eds., Philanthropy in the World’s Traditions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), x. 77 Kathleen D. McCarthy, ‘The History of Philanthropy and Non-profits’, Third Sector Review 4, no. 2(1998): 8. 78 Richard Miller Devens, Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country, political, military, mechanical, social, scientific and commercial, embracing also delineations of all the great historic characters celebrated in the annals of the republic, men of heroism, statesmanship, genius, oratory, adventure and philanthropy (Guelph, Ont.; Sydney: J.W. Lyon, 1878); Joseph Irving, The book of Scotsmen eminent for achievements in arms and arts, church and state, law, legislation, and literature, commerce, science, travel and philanthropy (Paisley: A. Gardner, 1881) (DSM/ 920.041/ I). Samuel Adams Drake, ed., Our world’s great benefactors offering short biographies of the men and women most eminent in philanthropy, patriotism, Art, Literature, Discovery, Science and Invention (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884). 79 Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Bluestocking Sisters: Women's Patronage, Millenium Hall, and “The Visible Providence of a Country”’, Eighteenth-century Life 30, no.1 (Winter 2005): 25-55; On philanthropy linked to British national identity see David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Geographies of colonial philanthropy’, Progress in Human Geography 28, no.3 (2004): 329. 80 Geoff Ginn, ‘Gifts of Culture, Centres of Light, Cultural Philanthropy in the Late-Victorian East End’ (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 2001), iii.

28 anthropos (humankind).81 Examining the genesis of philanthrôpía as a word in Periclean Athens, Marty Sulek sees the term ‘philanthropy’ as a ‘signal word’ with meanings assigned to it that have undergone changes through history in ways that illuminate both contemporary and academic understandings of the term.82 He says the term encapsulates the essence of the predominant notions of philanthropy in the following definition: ‘love motivating the greater realization of human potential’.83 Altruism is considered as the key intent that philanthropy expresses: a concern for the welfare of others; selflessness. As Thomas Dixon outlines, this intent underscored Victorian moral thought.84 Scholars argue that this intention explains the prevalence of philanthropy in Victorian life: religion, service, and art being the ideals (the ‘civilizing mission’) that offered respite from the materialism of Victorian enterprise.85 Today, discourse about giving and third-sector (philanthropic) activity occurs across academic departments world-wide in a number of fields from charity and welfare to cultural studies.86 This range has widened approaches to philanthropy study, bringing cross-fertilization to it that has proved useful when scholars lack a comprehensive definition to guide inquiry into what philanthropy is and why it matters.87 One result from this cross-fertilization is that the historiography of public giving has undergone revision in the past fifteen years and made more clearly visible philanthropy’s role in cultural modernization.88

81 Paul G. Schervish, ‘Philanthropy’s Janus-faced Potential: The Dialectic of Care and Negligence Donors Face’, in Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving, eds. William Damon and Susan Verducci (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 177. 82 Marty Sulek, ‘On the Classical Meaning of Philanthropia, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 39 (2010), 385-408 online at http://nvs.sagepub.com/content/39/3/385 (accessed September 12, 2010). 83 Sulek, ‘Philanthropia’, 389. 84 Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 2008). 85 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture & the City, Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 75 and Chapter 4; Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Age of Philanthropy’, The Wilson Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 55. Also, Alison Twells, The Civilizing Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008). 86 For the inclusive meaning of the term ‘third sector’ see the definition by the Australia and New Zealand Third Sector Research Incorporated (ANZTSR) online at http://www.anztsr.org.au/third1.htm (accessed November 2, 2010). 87 Most studies on philanthropy give an account of definitional difficulties. See Kate Hill, ‘Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage and Civil Society, Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, Review’, Economic History Society 58, no.1 (February 2005): 223-224. 88 C. Jones, ‘Some Recent Trends in the History of Charity’, in Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. Martin Daunton (Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 1996), 51-63.

29 To begin with transatlantic historians of the nineteenth-century focused on social philanthropy. This was generally read in terms of the provision of welfare (for example in Britain in terms of social action with regard to the development of the welfare state; and in America to meeting welfare needs that resulted from changing market forces with the growth of corporate capitalism). In Australia, historical attention went to charitable philanthropy and its mechanisms.89 Subsequent northern hemisphere studies addressed the significance of associative activity and voluntarism in fostering civility and civil society within the West’s developing ‘public sphere’ outlined by the influential German sociologist Jürgen Habermas.90 More recently, studies have illustrated how private philanthropy was pivotal to modernizing urban services and to reshaping the urban landscape and developing municipal cultural advances. These accounts include architectural studies by scholars of the Libraries and Museums Movement (from 1845-1850 to 1914) like Daniel F. Fox, work from scholars of the modern town planning movement (1889-1913) like Helen Meller, and of the late-Victorian Aesthetic Movement (1868-1900) like Diane Maltz.91 Maltz develops the concept of ‘missionary philanthropy’ by documenting the aesthetic and philanthropic affiliations of sixty-three social reformers, educators, and clergy, the missionary aesthetes, who ‘institutionalized aestheticism as a species of philanthropy’.92 Philanthropic and cultural missions fused in the work of these missionary aesthetes who sought to change issues of health and welfare through introducing art into working-class lives. Among examples in London were the Whitechapel Art Gallery where exhibitions were funded by English journalist and philanthropist John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911), the Bishopsgate Institute (operating as a cultural centre since 1895) and Horniman Museum (opened in 1901).93

89 Brian Dickey, No Charity There: A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Stephen Garton, Out of Luck, Poor Australians and Social Welfare (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990); Anne P. O'Brien, Poverty's Prison. The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988). 90 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 91 Daniel M. Fox, Engines of Culture: Philanthropy and Art Museums (New Brunswick, N. J., U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1995); Helen Meller, Towns, Plans, and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900, Beauty for the People (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 92 Maltz, Aestheticism, 2. 93 Deborah E. B. Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in late-Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1994), 215-8.

30 Accounts by scholars like Maltz chart the complexity of late nineteenth century philanthropic vision. Recent disciplinary cross-fertilization has led to appreciating philanthropy as an expression of cultural concerns. Scholars like Jessica Elfenbein, Helen Horowitz and Kathleen D. McCarthy (among others) have examined philanthropy in the context of the cultural development of the Victorian city.94 Outlining the development of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (c. 1877), James Moore noted how philanthropy was a ‘negotiated activity’ that entailed contextual complexities which differed among the donor and receiver and wider society alike.95 Studies like this, alongside Peter Clark’s anatomy of an ‘associational world’, while flagging the complexity to understandings of philanthropy, have shown how philanthropy is culture-specific and informed by its locale.96 Robert L. Payton and Michael P. Moody confirm this; they discuss how each culture develops a distinctive philanthropic tradition that reflects other aspects of that society.97 They say that people in any civilization exercise their culturally shaped moral imaginations in unique ways that can only be understood by appreciating the sources of the philanthropic tradition, both ancient and modern, and how these influenced philanthropic actions and meanings over time. They think of the course of philanthropic history in any civilization as ‘the social history of the moral imagination’.98 For them, philanthropy history is the story of human effort to improve human society and the lives of others. Individuals possess a vision of the public good and invent forms of voluntary action to advance that good; they exercise their moral imagination in particular historical contexts to bring forth ‘good works’.99 Philanthropy is a pro-social activity. This view was expressed in W. K. Jordan’s seminal analysis of historical

94 Jessica I. Elfenbein, The Making of a Modern City, Philanthropy, Civic Culture, and the Baltimore YMCA (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Kathleen D. McCarthy, ‘Creating the American Athens: Cities, Cultural Institutions, and the Arts, 1840-1939’, American Quarterly 37 (3) 1985: 426-39. 95 James Moore, ‘The Art of Philanthropy? The formation and development of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpoool’, Museum and Society 2, no. 2 (July 2004): 68. 96 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800, The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 284; 481. 97 Robert L. Payton & Michael P. Moody, Understanding Philanthropy: its Meaning and Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 131. 98 Ibid., 132. Loosely borrowing this phrase from anthropologist Clifford Geertz: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975), Chapter 1, 4-30. 99 Ibid., 154;

31 philanthropy; it bore the subtitle that it was a study of changing patterns of social aspirations.100 However, appreciating the contextual complexity in ‘giving behaviour’ transcends Jordan’s consideration in 1959 that explanations of benevolent action, ‘remain buried deep in the recesses of our nature, immune, perhaps happily, from the fumbling probing of the historian’.101 Since then, until the 1990s, much philanthropy research has been highly narrative, reflecting as Kathleen D. McCarthy summarised it in 1998, ‘older modes of historical and sociological writing that aimed to gather as many details as possible, and to let the facts ‘speak for themselves’.’102 But, as Sir Brian Harrison put it in 1966, it is now understood the influences that prompt ‘a man to give his money away: [may be] a hidden prompting from within, certainly, but [are] also a social situation – a complex of ideas – which historians are quite competent to analyse.’103 Harrison singled out the motives of Victorian philanthropists as deserving close attention; he urged that Victorian philanthropy must be discussed in relation to wider social patterns than what Jordan put as ‘the too arrogantly pitched enquiry of the psychoanalyst’. McCarthy and historians of women’s history have demonstrated how better understanding of female philanthropy in the nineteenth century illuminates the history of that period.104 Additionally, gift theory in anthropological study has shown that giving is vital to forming human bonds and social alliances. French sociologist Marcel Mauss demonstrated the advantage to be gained from ‘social insurance, solicitude in mutuality or cooperation’; the mutuality between individual and common interest; and that giving revitalizes society.105 Empirical research on late twentieth-century patterns of philanthropic giving has identified a complex pattern of motivations, with reciprocity thought to be a ‘common and persistent motivation for philanthropy’.106

100 Wilbur Kitchener Jordan, Philanthropy in England 1480-1660, A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959). 101 Jordan, Philanthropy, 144. 102 Kathleen D. McCarthy, ‘The history of philanthropy and nonprofits’, 8. 103 Brian Harrison, ‘Philanthropy and the Victorians’, Victorian Studies 9, no. 4 (June 1966): 357. 104 Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Dorice Williams Elliot, The Angel Out of the House, Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002). 105 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, intro. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967), 67, 76, 81. 106 Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19. He also offers discussion of the considerable literature that is devoted to the merits of giving in terms of social solidarity.; Francie Ostrower, Why the Wealthy Give, the Culture

32 English writer Matt Ridley shows how emotions elicit reciprocity.107 Alan Wolf argues that appreciation of multiplicity and recognizing the ‘complexity of human objectives’ offers greatest understanding. He views altruistic acts as one of the most important things that people do. Altruism requires that an individual make choices in the context of particular situations. ‘If we leave the definition of altruism relatively open, both our understanding of people and our appreciation for their multiple objectives are likely to be enhanced.’108 With more theoretical underpinnings that stem from a range of approaches, philanthropy is now understood to be a complex social activity. Manchester historian Alan J. Kidd has described philanthropy as the ‘non-commercial social transfers of wealth, material objects or non-material assistance rendered in forms that are culturally meaningful’.109 Kidd, who views philanthropy as a variety of giving behaviour, argues it is possible to regard a particular act of ‘giving’ or a charitable life as a cultural performance to be decoded.110 He is among those who advocate, like Mark Lyons did, that more theoretically self-conscious, social histories of philanthropy are needed.111 Some explain philanthropy as a behavioural pattern that has shaped social distinctions and defined the upper class.112 This view associates philanthropic activity with buying respectability. Social analyst Thomas Adam sees philanthropy as part of conspicuous consumption that was ‘engaged in by ‘new’ (aspirational) and ‘old’ (established) elites through sponsoring social housing, museum, and library

of Elite Philanthropy (New York: Princeton University Press, 1995), 14-19; Dwight F. Burlingame, ed., Philanthropy in America. A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (Santa Barbara, Calf: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004), 409. 107 Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 136. 108 Alan Wolfe, ‘What is Altruism?’ in Walter W. Powell and Elisabeth S. Clemens, eds., Private Action and the Public Good (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998), 44. 109 Alan J. Kidd, ‘Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm’, Social History 21, no. 2 (May 1996): 184. This echoes Kathleen D. McCarthy’s definition. 110 Kidd, ‘Philanthropy’, 182. 111 Lyons, ‘The history of non-profit organisations in Australia’, 24. 112 Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage and Civil Society, Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); idem., Buying Respectability, Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective 1840s to 1930s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). For a similar view see V. Long, ‘Collectors of works of art and donations to museums at the end of the 19th century: the Louvre museum as an example’, Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2002): 45-54; Edward N. Saveth, ‘Patrician philanthropy in America: The late 19th and early 20th centuries’, Social Service Review 54, no. 1 (March 1980): 76-91; Donileen R. Loseke, ‘‘The Whole Spirit of Modern Philanthropy’: The Construction of the Idea of Charity’, 1912- 1992, Social Problems 44, no. 4 (November 1997): 425-444; Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 370.

33 projects’.113 To Adam, this activity was engaged in principally to gain social status and to exercise social power. Picking up on the ‘malice and vanity’ amongst philanthropists that Emerson cautioned against, Adam portrays philanthropy as being adopted by wealthy citizens in order to become accepted in high society; aspiring elites and certain groups of people traditionally excluded from power positions were able to gain both social status and power by engaging in philanthropy which was a tool of upward mobility.114 Others see Adam’s view as too reductive because it ignores the pivotal role that philanthropy played in metropolitan development and modernization, particularly in developing the culture and life of institutions of nineteenth century cities.115 Northern Hemisphere studies which show philanthropy in this light include those from Deborah Weiner, Abigail van Slyck, Alan Kidd, Brian Maidment and John Archer. Deborah Weiner and Abigail van Slyck focus on the interplay between philanthropic practices and built forms.116 They show how architecture that became a feature of urbanisation evolved from philanthropic practices such as occurred with the Victorian invention of public libraries. Weiner takes the view that paternalism underpinned the erection of the architectural structures of institutions of reform and philanthropy in late nineteenth century London that she discusses. Van Slyck who focuses on the Carnegie Libraries erected in America from 1890, sums up Andrew Carnegie’s importance as resting in the substantive discussion that his library philanthropy triggered ‘about the role that culture should play in modern America’.117 In counterpoint to their illustration of the intersection between patronage and practice, Alan Kidd, Brian Maidment and John Archer consider the evolution of cultural

113 Adam, Respectability, 8. 114 Emerson, Essays, 51.; Thomas Adam, ‘Transatlantic Trading, The Transfer of Philanthropic Models between European and North American Cities during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 28, no. 3 (March 2002): 328-351; Kate Hill, ‘Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage and Civil Society, Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, Review’, Economic History Society (2005): 223-224. 115 Horwitz, Culture, Chapter 5. Likewise historians presenting Enlightenment philanthropy as a form of social control (such as Foucault and Finzsch) have been criticised for being overly reductionist. See David Garrioch, ‘Making a better world, Enlightenment and Philanthropy’ in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman , eds., The Enlightenment World (New York: Routledge, 2004), 498. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison transl. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1975/1977); Norbert Finzsch, ‘Elias, Foucault, Oestrich’ in Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, eds., Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 116 Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform, 1; Abigail Van Slyck, Free to All, Carnegie Libraries and American Culture 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8. 117 Van Slyck, Free to All, 43.

34 activity in nineteenth century Manchester. They show the interplay between philanthropy and the institutions that benefitted from it (like the John Rylands Library) and how this added to the city’s quality of life.118 In recent study of the boards of four national cultural institutions in London from 1890 Andrea Geddes-Poole sees that Edwardian philanthropy while a continuum of nineteenth century middle-class benefaction signaled (with the founding of the National Art Collections Fund in 1903) a transformation not only in philanthropy but also in cultural life. She points to tensions that existed then between increasing state involvement, individual acts of philanthropy and organized collective activity from the middle class, and argues that deeper knowledge of these tensions can enhance understanding of voluntary associations, stewardship, and civil society.119 Ultimately, as Kate Hill stressed when reviewing Thomas Adam’s 2004 study, ‘the concept of philanthropy itself is particularly problematic. Every contributor defines it but there is little agreement between them.’120 It is a contested concept say Payton & Moody.121 Adam agrees, having noted that ‘scholars have failed to develop a united theoretical concept of philanthropy’.122 Hill points out (like Payton and Moody argue) that historians must seek to understand how the definition changed over time before seeking to develop any analysis. This is critical to Mitchell’s history which spans three distinct eras of philanthropism (Appendix 6), making him a valuable subject to investigate. He personally inherited a legacy of practices dating from the eighteenth century when philanthropy became part of public cultural consumption and display in Britain.123

118 Michael E. Rose, ‘Culture, philanthropy, and the Manchester middle classes’ in City, Class, and Culture, Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, eds. Alan J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); B. E. Maidment, ‘Class and cultural production in the industrial city’, in City, Class, and Culture, Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, eds. Alan J. Kidd and K.W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); John Maddison, ‘Basil Champoneys and the John Rylands Library’ in John H. G. Archer, ed., Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 230-249. 119 Geddes-Poole, Stewards, 55, 127-8. 120 Hill, ‘Review Thomas Adam ed.’, 223-224. 121 Payton & Moody, Philanthropy, 29. 122 Adam, Philanthropy, patronage and civil society, 4. 123 Crystal B. Lake, ‘Redecorating the Ruin: Women and Antiquarianism in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall’, ELH 76, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 661-686; Jad Smith, ‘Charity Education and the Spectacle of “Christian Entertainment” in The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37-54; Cecil Aspinall- Oglander, Admiral’s Wife, Being the Life and Letters of The Hon. Mrs. Edward Boscawen from 1719 to 1761 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1940), 129.

35 Paternalistic patronage featured in the first era of philanthropism. As we shall see, Mitchell’s understanding of this stemmed from legacies he inherited from seventeenth century mercantile culture besides eighteenth century associational culture that marked the more mobile and industrializing world of the ‘long’ eighteenth century. However, by the late eighteenth century, ideas about civility and civic culture (influenced by Enlightenment philosophies) collided with industrialization.124 Industrialization and urbanization caused extreme distress among the humbler classes. Their distress was considered as one of the main symptoms of social disharmony as observers at the time and into the nineteenth century made clear.125 Not only did this stress challenge social order; it also explains the emphasis that later twentieth century historians have given to the ‘social control thesis’ regarding the role of philanthropy in maintaining social order. Historians have established the historical depth of paternalistic values in England, and the principle that those in authority have a duty to maintain community harmony through personalized philanthropy.126 In his outline of late sixteenth century manorial economy, Adam Nicholson offers historical understanding to the depth of

124 For this see David Garrioch, ‘Making a better world, Enlightenment and Philanthropy’, in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, Iain McCalman, The Enlightenment World (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), On associational culture see R. J. Morris, ‘Clubs, societies and associations’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3, 1750-1950, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 395-443; and R. J., Morris, ‘Civil society, associations, and urban places: class, nation, and culture in nineteenth-century Europe’ in Civil Society, Associations, and Urban Places, Class, Nation, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Graeme Morton, Boudien de Vries and R.J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). In terms of libraries see, James Raven, ‘Libraries for sociability: the advance of the subscription library’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, 1640–1850, eds. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 241-263; Paul Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth- Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, vol. 12 (2002): 311- 331. 125 John Lhotsky, (with and introduction by Viscount Ranelagh), On cases of death by starvation, and extreme distress among the humbler classes microform: considered as one of the main symptoms of the present disorganization of society: with a preparatory plan for remedying these evils in the metropolis and other large cities (London: J. Ollivier, 1844). 126 David E. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964) 1-3. Also, Kevin Swafford, Class in Late-Victorian Britain, the Narrative Concern With Social Hierarchy and its Representation (Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007); F. David Roberts, The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); David Roberts, ‘Tory paternalism and social reform in early Victorian England’ in The Victorian Revolution, Government and Society in Victoria's Britain, ed., introd., Peter Stansky (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 147-164, especially 159. Roberts cites Coleridge’s maxim to act ‘personally and in detail wherever it is practical.’ S. T. Coleridge, ‘A Lay Sermon’, in Complete Works (London: E. Moxon, 1853), 6:225; F. David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1979). On paternalism: Archibald Paton Thornton, The Habit of Authority, Paternalism in British History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966); Kim Lawes, Paternalism and Politics, the Revival of Paternalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).

36 paternalism and patronage that existed in England.127 He makes clear the extent of obligation in terms of estate management – a theme which was elaborated on by eighteenth century social reformer Sarah Scott in The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) when the old squirarchical approach to integrated assistance became ill- matched to the developing market economies of the eighteenth century. Historians such as Donna T. Andrew argue that giving assistance became a serious avocation by the end of the eighteenth-century to counter ensuing social unrest. This was a period that the English writer, moral evangelist and philanthropist Hannah More (1745-1833) saw as ‘the Age of Benevolence’, when humanitarian sentiment held sway.128 Sarah Scott wrote that when the forty-four-year old West Indian planter Sir George Ellison returns to England after fifteen years abroad he attributes the corruption of the country to the ‘necessitous state of too many of the individuals’.129 Giving assistance became an instrument of national regeneration to reform the minds and morals of the intemperate casual poor. Andrew highlights the aspirational and transformative character that philanthropy assumed, a theme which Hannah More and Sarah Scott emphasized. By the early nineteenth century philanthropy became a national social enterprise that Britons considered distinguished themselves in the ‘free world’ (as David Lambert and Alan Lester note).130 Giving of ‘not money, but yourselves’ (as the Victorian humanitarian Walter Besant wrote) was a feature of the ‘New Philanthropy’.131 The Victorian years ushered in the second era of philanthropy. Focus turned then from individual giving (whether in terms of money or of time) to organizational support (sometimes known as ‘umbrella philanthropy’). In the mid-Victorian years, ‘giving’ became more organised, particularly from 1869 with the foundation of the

127 Adam Nicolson, Arcadia, The Dream of Perfection in Renaissance England (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 86-98. 128 Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 201. Reference to More is cited by, Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The age of philanthropy’, Wilson Quarterly, 21, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 50. 129 Sarah Scott edited by Betty Rizzo, The History of Sir George Ellison (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 188. 130 Lambert & Lester, ‘Geographies’, 329. 131 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 53. Besides David Owen, the standard modern authorities on Victorian charity are Brian Harrison and Frank Prochaska. See Harrison, ‘Philanthropy and the Victorians’, 353- 74; idem., Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I982), chap. 5; Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I980); idem., The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber, 1988); idem., ‘Philanthropy’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3, 1750- 1950, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 357-393.

37 Charity Organization Society (COS), on which an entire tradition of historiography exists. Robert Humphreys and Richard Kennedy offer comparison of the Society’s experience in London and Melbourne.132 However, generally the recipients rather than donors of charity are studied.133 At the time some regarded organizations like the COS to be essential to meet charity fraud and ensure that support became more efficient. Their organizational structures and operations were refined to ensure that giving would become what the Victorians called more ‘scientific’ (ie. more responsible and effective). The foundation of the COS in Australia, where it was presided over by Mitchell’s friend Edward Ellis Morris (1843-1902), marked a significant change in attitudes and approaches to giving (as occurred elsewhere).134 As the century progressed, it became clearer that moralizing about the deserving and undeserving poor had little to do with need resulting from structural socio-economic problems. In attempts to meet these philanthropy gradually expanded from the mid-nineteenth-century beyond charitable activity into supporting educational measures and agencies (which included universities, schools, museums and libraries). Increasing specialism (as occurred with the COS, and with developments such as the Museum and Library Movement) saw philanthropic support become more institutionally organized. When backing these universities and libraries from the 1880s (in a period known in the northern hemisphere as the Age of Serial Philanthropy) notable activity by philanthropic individuals world-wide further refined support.135 Alistair Black and his colleagues explain that the term Serial Philanthropy, which refers to the period between 1883-1914, signifies contributions that replaced one-off donations from earlier times.

132 Robert Humphreys, Poor Relief and charity 1869-1945: the London Charity Organization Society (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001); History of the Charity Organization Society in Australia is covered by R. Kennedy, Charity Warfare: The Charity Organisation Society in Colonial Melbourne (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1985). See also Kathleen Woodroofe, ‘The Charity Organization Society and the origins of social casework’, Historical Studies: Australia & New Zealand 9, no. 33 (1959): 19-29; 133 Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 134 English-born, Melbourne-based academic and charity worker, Morris also knew Felton: John Poynter, ‘Alfred Felton and the Art of Making Bequests’ in Great Philanthropists on Trial, 24, 27. Also, Olive Wykes, ‘Morris, Edward Ellis (1843–1902)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/morris-edward- ellis-4251/text6869 (accessed 15 September 2011). 135 Alistair Black et al, Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 115. The term refers to the period between 1883-1914 and signifies contributions that replaced one-off donations from earlier times.

38 In turn, by later in the century it was recognized that Government should shoulder responsibility for supporting the agencies that were required. Growing social needs gave political urgency to reform that changed mechanisms for support. Necessarily this grew from relying on voluntary contributions to needing state backing.136 In hand with this came the specialization in professions that was a feature of the nineteenth-century, and growth in organizational and corporate structures that followed. Among these were the foundations that were established by substantial benefactors like Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and John D. Rockefeller (1839- 1937).137 As David Nasaw and Donald Fisher outline, Carnegie and Rockefeller’s ‘wholesale philanthropy’ approach in this third phase of philanthropy has shaped giving up to our present time. Commonly through these three phases, giving was based on an idealized historic structure, a moral evangelism, and the vision of an imagined future society of justice and opportunity.138 In all three eras, philanthropic practice was both a product of and a tool for its time; Joanna Innes demonstrates how support for public libraries between 1750 and 1850 evolved in response to changing social conditions, and directions taken were made in response to the times.139 By late century, publicly accessible libraries became matters of national interest.140 In Australia, Mitchell was among the philanthropic individuals who figured prominently in their generosity during the three decades from the 1880s (Appendix 11). They met the need to develop Australia’s three universities – established in Sydney (1850), Melbourne (1853) and Adelaide (1874); all insufficiently funded, their need was great.141 Bequests leading to university chairs and buildings were traditional

136 Geddes-Poole, Stewards, 101-129. The establishment of Britain’s National art-Collection Fund is portrayed as stemming from a perceived vacuum in philanthropy. 137 Donald Fisher, ‘Rockefeller philanthropy and the British Empire: The creation of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’. History of Education [Great Britain] 7(2) (1978): 129- 143. Rockefeller gave no money outright, but demanded that his gift be matched. 138 John Hamer, ‘English and American Giving: Past and Future Imaginings’, History and Anthropology 18, no. 4 (December 2007): 443-457. 139 Joanna Innes, ‘Libraries in context: social, cultural and intellectual background’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2 1640-1850, eds. Giles Mandelbrote & K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 285-300. 140 McKitterick, ‘Libraries’, 292. McKitterick cites John J. Ogle, The Free Library, its History and Present Condition (London: G. Allen, 1897). 141 As part of a wealthier and more culturally confident community; in terms of how this confidence boosted collecting activity (at least in Victoria) see Vaughan, ‘Before Felton’, 4-8.

39 expressions of philanthropy. If intended to memorialize the donors, they were also a badge of civic pride and caused community institutions to develop as was expected from colonial prosperity. Contemporary press reports show these developments were demanded by the public who called over many years for inadequate facilities to be developed (such as a free public library in Sydney). It was believed that inadequate access to information stalled colonial advance. Yet inauspicious circumstances bedevilled the erection and maintenance of such publicly desired institutions, and private gifts were needed to ‘lever state action’ into implementing cultural projects like institutions of learning.142 Earlier colonial development acted as a glue among practical men (and women) who led in Sydney’s self-aware nineteenth-century community. Intent on sharing information that would progress their economy and society they voluntarily grouped themselves into social groupings and voluntary associations that were organised and maintained through subscription philanthropy. ‘Learned’ examples of these associations were the Linnean and Geographic Societies to which Mitchell belonged. Voluntary social and ‘learned’ groupings like these became the cultural institutions of present-day Sydney (Appendix 10).143 As Bryan Magee puts it in his analysis of technological creativity in Pre-Federation Victoria, these groupings wanted to fuel the ‘Fire of Genius’.144 Mitchell lived through a foundational period in Australia’s history and none more so than in terms of the development of cultural repositories such as public libraries.

2.3 Inter-related issues required in research on Mitchell’s history Arguably the world’s best-known philanthropist from this era was the Scottish-born American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). He was born in Dunfermline in Fife, just five miles from where Mitchell’s father was baptized into

142 Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature, A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 144. They are surprised at the success of the ‘museum movement’ because colonial institutions had to operate in adverse circumstances.; Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals, 19, 95; Daunton, Knowledge, 21. 143 J. J. Fletcher, ed., The Macleay Memorial Volume (Sydney: Linnean Society of New South Wales, 1893); J. J. Fletcher. The Society's Heritage from the Macleays. Part 2 (Sydney: Linnean Society of New South Wales, 1929); A. B. Walkom, comp., The Linnean Society of New South Wales (founded 1874) for “the cultivation and study of the science of natural history in all its branches’, historical notes of its first fifty years (jubilee publication) (Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing Company, 1925). 144 Gary Bryan Magee, Knowledge Generation: Technological Change and Economic Growth in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2000), 3.

40 the Presbyterian Church. Socially entrepreneurial, Carnegie argued that those who possessed wealth were only trustees of that wealth, which must be returned to society to provide opportunities for those determined to advance by their own drive.145 Both an example and an apostle of self-help, Carnegie put his ideas into practice from 1901, his personal priority being free public libraries. Carnegie’s libraries program was his solution to the lack of educational opportunities in the late nineteenth century. Libraries were among the first to benefit from turn-of-the-century largesse, with benefactors like Carnegie and Mitchell believing in the importance of education and leading to be replaced with creating what David McKitterick calls ‘a sense of identity in public knowledge’ (wherein knowledge and public identity lay in the library world).146 Both men were recipients themselves of educational opportunities albeit in contrasting ways; both took self-education seriously, including their own self- education.147 This underlay their experience with their own libraries and with their views about accessing literature. With philanthropy like theirs directed to public libraries and figuring so largely during the turn of the century, it might be expected that analysis of their initiative would come from library history. While library history is now a richly- developed field in the northern hemisphere, Australia’s library history has received relatively scant attention from scholarship. Generally, Australia’s library history is lost in journalistic approaches to institutional histories both resembling the histories of the nation’s other cultural agencies and of the kind that Mark Lyons criticized. More substantial cover sporadically appears within journals (such as the La Trobe Journal; Australian Library Journal; Archives and Manuscripts; Australian Academic and Research Libraries Journal). Beyond them detail about Australia’s library history intermittently comes to light in papers from the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand; and in unpublished librarianship theses such as from Jack Nelson and Valerie Schweinsberg.148 This seeming lack of attention to

145 Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and other timely essays (London: Warne, 1901). 146 David McKitterick, ‘Libraries’, 287, 312. 147 Nasaw, Carnegie, 42-45; Michael Lorenzen, “Deconstructing the Carnegie Libraries.” Illinois Libraries 81, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 76, online at http://www.lib.niu.edu/1999/il990275.html (accessed August 26, 2010); Abigail A. van Slyck, ‘“The Utmost Amount of Effective [sic] Accommodation”: Andrew Carnegie and the Reform of the American Library’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, no. 4 (December 1991): 359-383. The Victorians took self-culture to heart and lauded self-educated working men. 148 Published since 1970, the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand

41 Australia’s library history is despite recognition by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) for the need for this research. Michael K. Buckland stresses the importance of knowing ‘who knew about what when?’ in ‘giving us a fuller, richer sense of identity’.149 Similar remarks made in the United States about the importance of the history of libraries are pertinent to Australia’s library history. When referring to the history of libraries in the American context, historian Jonathan E. Rose observed that ‘the library is an artifact of our historical landscape that offers unique perspectives on important themes in the development of [American] culture: the history of leisure and work; the emergence of the professions; the formation of gender, class, and racial identities; the evolution of civic architecture; and the organization of knowledge and intellectual property’.150 This is pertinent to Mitchell who lived with these issues and whose personal history overlaps with the history of the institution that is today’s State Library of New South Wales (Appendix 4). It also indicates some of the complexity that any critical reading of a subject like him entails. Whether philanthropy is linked to social standing or to metropolitan development, the complexity of motives behind giving, require investigation (as Brian Harrison maintained).151 Schervish views philanthropy as a social relation that is quite

is now titled Script and print and can be read online at http://scriptandprint.blogspot.com/ (accessed February 2, 2011). For a single general introduction see John Balnaves and Peter Biskup, Australian Libraries 2nd ed. (Sydney: Bennett, 1975); R. Nelson, Cataloguing theory and practice in Australian libraries in the nineteenth century with particular emphasis on New South Wales (M. Lib. diss., University of New South Wales, 1979); Valerie Ann Schweinsberg, The State Library of Queensland: its origins, personalities and reasons for its late development (Master of Letters diss., University of New England, 1995). 149 Thomas Augst and Kenneth E. Carpenter, ‘“The History of Libraries in the United States”: A Conference Report’, Libraries & the Cultural Record 38, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 61-66. Joyce Kirk, ‘Finale’, Research applications in information and library studies seminar (RAILS) 2006 online at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/63813/200609270000/www.csu.edu.au/faculty/sciagr/sis/CIS/epubs/RAI LS/finale.pdf (accessed September 9, 2010); Michael K. Buckland, ‘Five grand challenges for library research’. Library Trends 51, no. 4 (2003): 675-686, 688. 150 Cited by Edward A. Goedeken, ‘Our Historiographical Enterprise: Shifting Emphases and Directions’, Libraries and the Cultural Record 45, no. 3 (2010): 353-4. See also Augst & Carpenter, ‘“History”, 66. For recent literature on library history (from an American perspective) see Wayne A. Wiegand, ‘American Library History Literature, 1947-1997: Theoretical Perspectives?’, Libraries & Culture 35, no. 1 (winter 2000): 4-34. Comparative Australian analysis comes from Donald Boadle, ‘Using history: historical research and publication by Australian librarians and archivists’, Australian Library Journal 55, no.2 (May 2006): 159-172. 151 Harrison, ‘Philanthropy’, 1966; Also, Charles H. Hamilton, Warren F. Ilchman, eds. Cultures of Giving II: How Heritage, Gender, Wealth, and Values Influence Philanthropy (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

42 distinct from commercial and political relations.152 Going to the ancient Greek derivation of the term, Schervish sees philanthropy as a humanist activity that requires love of neighbour. Philanthropy is fundamentally underpinned by the virtue of care and the sentiment of identification. Agreeing with this view, Robert Payton and Michael Moody further established that philanthropy is an activity that has long been linked to moral action and spurred by belief in bettering the world – a vital sentiment during the utilitarian Age of Improvement that was the Victorian era.153 It is ‘about mission, shared values, organization and much else before and besides money’.154 Schervish’s ‘sentiment of identification’ pertains to Mitchell who was deeply attached to his birthplace.155 His concern about the quality of Sydney’s future development is clear judging from the texts he left. His reading reveals his engagement with its future. He read widely on crime, destitution, education, immigration, land reform, legal reform, penal reform, prostitution, public health, sanitation, and welfare. The attention he gave to these issues has received no consideration so far. Then again, no appreciation of his literature has occurred and no analysis of his reading has been made. So far accounts only sweepingly refer to Mitchell holding an interest in poetry, particularly of the early English period, and these generally stem from observations made by Bertram Stevens in 1907.156 Citing Stevens, Brian Fletcher notes Mitchell’s interest in ‘Elizabethan drama, eighteenth century literature and nineteenth century poetry’.157 Based on literary and artistic depictions of charity between 1832 and 1870, Leslee A. Zillmer, writing about Victorian class relations as reflected in these depictions, adopts readings by Schervish and Payton and Moody to consider charity and philanthropy as ‘social endeavours’ that were used by people in their attempt to benefit those who needed assistance, as well as to maintain social harmony and

152 Paul G. Schervish, ‘Philanthropy’ in Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, vol. 1, ed., Robert Wuthnow (Washington, D. C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1998), 600-603; Susan A. Ostrander and Paul G. Schervish, ‘Giving and Getting: Philanthropy as a Social Relationship’, in Critical Issues in American Philanthropy: Strengthening Theory and Practice, ed., Jon Van Til (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 1990), 19; 67. 153 Payton & Moody, Philanthropy, 14; 97. 154 Payton & Moody, Philanthropy, 95. 155 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 468. 156 Stevens, ‘Mitchell Library’, 581. According to this Mitchell ‘preferred Elizabethan works and the Romantic poets’.; Meachen, ‘The Collectors’. 157 Fletcher, Obsession, 15.

43 remedy social evils.158 Zillmer did not distinguish between both terms because ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’ were terms that were used interchangeably in the Victorian period. This is just as Mitchell and his family knew them. Another salutary point that Zillmer stresses is that the cultural baggage of customs and ideas transplanted from Britain to different geographies provides a basis for understanding the many positions and ideas regarding assistance and giving.159 Giving is bound up with and defined by cultural values. Transported and translated, giving becomes culture-specific (as seen with the Howitts in Melbourne). Hence consideration of philanthropy requires more than study of mechanisms (the ‘actual’ process of giving); it also requires appreciation of the complex web of beliefs (the ‘imaginary’ process, the mindset behind giving). Substantive appreciation of philanthropy requires analysis of both aspects with their connections and tensions. It requires appreciation of the ‘networks of interconnected concepts, with the concepts, and the connections between them’, that Mark Bevir argues must be a starting point for enquiry into the nature of the history of ideas.160 Literary historian Penny Fielding demonstrated this when untangling some of the representations of place in Scotland and as Scotland in the Romantic period. She maintains that Scotland – so far from being secondary to England, a latecomer to the Union – ‘offers a source for Britishness itself’ and ‘completes British wholeness’.161 Consequently, an understanding of Mitchell requires knowledge of his extended Anglo-Scottish family and the legacy he inherited from them. Mitchell’s family were among the ‘really respectable settlers’, whom John Macarthur proposed to Commissioner Bigge in 1821 that New South Wales needed. Many (like them) were Scots and Peninsular War veterans, who came to the colony

158 Leslee A. Zillmer, Charity and Class in Victorian Literature and Art, PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1998), 12. For a comparative view that considers the representation of children in colonial Australia, and the relationship between class structure and the development of ideology and professionalization concerning children, see Jan Kociumbas, Children and Society in New South Wales and Victoria 1860-1914 (PhD diss., Sydney University, 1983). 159 Zillmer, Charity, 12; Australian example of transplanted policy is given by Patricia Crawford, ‘“Civic fathers” and children, Continuities from Elizabethan England to the Australian colonies’, History Australia 5, no. 1 (April 2008): 1-16. See also, J. R. T. Hughes, ‘A World Elsewhere: The Importance of Starting English’ in Landowners, Capitalists, and Entrepreneurs: Essays for Sir John Habakkuk, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 160 Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 178, 191. 161 Penny Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19; 10.

44 after the Napoleonic Wars with a sense of mutual obligation honed by their military experience. Consequently their influence in the Australian colonies became profound, changing New South Wales from a penal and military society to a free one. Christine Wright shows that these veterans contributed profoundly to colonial development, and to shaping Australian values and institutions.162 She reinforces the social networks they created, which made an impact on the exercise of the law, marriage and settlement patterns, and the social and public life of the colonies. The roots of philanthropic tradition in Scotland have been outlined, with social historian Olive Checkland best showing how the voluntary principle shaped social responsibility and social welfare in Scotland.163 More broadly, according to Frank Prochaska, thinking about philanthropy as kindness ‘conveys the importance of philanthropy at all social levels and reveals its implications for individuals, families and communities. Cast widely to include informal, domestic expressions of kindness, the philanthropic net catches virtually everyone at one time or another.’164 Indeed the voluntary principle ran deep through Scottish custom and through all levels of society.165 How the voluntary principle was transported and applied by the Scots who emigrated to Australia has only been touched on by way of single biographies, as by Malcolm Sealy on Alexander Berry (1781-1873).166 Studies of the Scottish diaspora remain general: Leigh Straw testifies to the efforts made by the first Scottish migrants in Western Australia between 1829 and 1850, and Jim Hewitson glides over Scottish experiences there.167 Michael Fry, Tom Devine, and Malcom Prentis sketch the

162 Christine A. Wright, ‘Really respectable settlers’: Peninsular War veterans in the Australian colonies, 1820s and 1830s. (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 2005). She stresses that many of the men who in earlier histories have been called the ‘founding fathers’ of Australia had a Peninsular War background.; See also, National Library of Scotland. That Land of Exiles: Scots in Australia (H.M.S.O, Edinburgh, 1988). 163 Olive Checkland, Philanthropy in Victorian Scotland: Social Welfare and the Voluntary Principle (Edinburgh: Donald, 1980); See too Audrey Paterson, “Philanthropy in Victorian Scotland.” Economic History Review 34, no.4 (November 1981): 658-9. 164 F. K. Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3, 1750-1950 Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 360. 165 John L. Duthie, ‘Philanthropy and evangelism among Aberdeen seamen, 1814-1924’, Scottish Historical Review 63 (October 1984): 155-173. 166 Malcolm Sealy, The Journeys to Coolangatta: Alexander Berry, the Scottish Settler, and His Australian Succession (Glebe, N.S.W.: M. Sealy through Book House, 2000). 167 Leigh S. L. Straw, A Semblance of Scotland: Scottish identity in colonial Western Australia (Glasgow: Grimsay Press, 2006); Jim Hewitson, Far-off in Sunlit Places: Stories of the Scots in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000).

45 success of Scottish settlers in Australia.168 Their outlines do not substantively probe nor portray the depth of the voluntary principle in Australia, although Eric Richards stresses how formal and informal social networks (whether mercantile or family networks) were vital tools among the Scots in the practical business of long-distance emigration.169 He sees these social networks as critical in analysis of Scottish migration, and by example stresses the strength of links among ‘Kirkaldyites’.170 Settling in Australia in the early 1820s, Mitchell’s family offers insight into the communitarian ethos found among pioneering communities where resources were scarce, fortunes fluctuated, and informal assistance was given within the family and between neighbours. Mitchell’s family provides a lens through which insight into such informal assistance can be appreciated. It also offers insight into how Scotch philanthropic legacy was transplanted and how philanthropic activities sprang from this reciprocity. A long line of scholarship provides historical background to the Christian dimension of benefaction in which the voluntary principle figured largely. G. Maurice Ditchfield summarizes how evangelism impressed minds with the need for moral good and public utility.171 Peter Clark goes further and outlines pre-nineteenth century roots to voluntary assistance. He demonstrates ‘skeins of social and cultural contact, which pulled together upper and middling social groups in a range of communities’, and describes the linkages between social groups as self-help that buttressed urban development.172 Support given by Mitchell’s forebears saw them behind reform, in keeping with historical illustrations of the interaction between charity, philanthropy and reform such as Ditchfield and Clark document. Their activity also matches what Joanna Innes describes as the institutional ‘decomposition and recomposition’ that marked the first half of the nineteenth century.173 Social historians Stania Nedanic and

168 Michael Fry, The Scottish empire (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2001), 471, 474-5; T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004), 271-289; Malcolm D. Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 2nd Edition (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008). 169 Eric Richards, ‘Scottish networks and voices in colonial Australia’ in Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Angela McCarthy (London: Tauris, 2006), 156-163. 170 Kirkaldy connections are exemplified by Robert Barr Smith, see p.4; Richards, ‘Scottish networks’, 10, 171-4. 171 G. Maurice Ditchfield, Evangelical Revival (London; Bristol, Pa.: UCL Press, 1998). 172 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118, 330-331,453, 458, 464. 173 Innes, ‘Libraries in context’, 289-90, 295-7.

46 Rab Houston support this reading of the ‘dislocation’ of society undergoing industrial and commercial expansion.174 They see urban groups of middle rank and wealth subjected to the pressures of change with the middle classes going through a process of ‘ordering’ that was related to calls for political reform. Nedanic outlines how calls for democratic reform in Scotland between the 1770s and 1830s prompted the middle class to stress education and knowledge as the basis for legitimate participation in government. Houston anatomizes the ethos of Scottish education, ‘a keystone of the Scottish identity’, in which stories of social mobility through education ‘would help to preserve the existing fabric of society by drawing attention away from the more egregious injustices pointed out by the Radicals.’175 He notes that the freethinking propagandist Thomas Paine (1736-1809) believed that the poor were more aware of the benefits of education than they were credited for.176 Andrew Carnegie gives proof of this: his father and other Dunfermline weavers pooled scarce resources to buy books from which one of them read aloud as they worked.177 Further proof comes from the rapid growth of Mechanics’ Institutes (first formed in Scotland) and their libraries, and other voluntary associations, by which working men attempted educational self-improvement across northern Britain in what some historians see as a ‘national ethos’ which emphasized education.178 Beliefs that Mitchell’s family held were consistent with these calls for democratic reform alongside experience of egalitarian Scotch parish education,

174 Stana Nenadic, ‘Political Reform and the ‘ordering’ of Middle Class Protest in T. M. Devine, ed., Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700-1850: Proceeding of the Scottish Historical Studies Seminar, University of Strathclyde 1988-89 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1990), 78.; R.A. Houston. Scottish literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600-1800 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 248, 250-255. 175 Houston, Literacy, 244; 248. Houston contends that universal Scottish literacy was a myth, although most historians regard reading literacy in Scotland was widespread and the national system of parish schools was impressive and had profound consequences for Scottish society. It is seen as strengthening the democratic outlook of the Scots. See Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 19, 59. 176 Tom Devine holds a similar opinion about the value placed on education, particularly by the rural population. He cites the Statistical Account of the 1790s as evidence for the demand for basic literacy. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 96. 177 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy and Public Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 16. 178 On working men’s desire working together or by mutual improvement societies and Friendly Societies: J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790-1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 51-4. On lower-class demand for education in eighteenth century England see T. W. Laqueur ‘Working class demand and the growth of English elementary education, 1750-1850’ in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. Lawrence Stone (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 193-4, 256-7 cited by Houston, Scottish Literacy, 262. In reference to northern Britain see E. G. West, ‘Resource allocation and growth in early nineteenth century British education’ in Applied Historical Studies, An Introductory Reader, ed. M. Drake (London: Methuen, 1973), 65.

47 communal traditions and Thomas Chalmers’ (1780-1847) prescriptions on urban social relationships. These beliefs were part of the mix that lay behind their approaches to benefaction. Principles derived from this legacy underpinned Mitchell’s life-long support of the ragged school movement in New South Wales.179 Support for reformist schools, like those run by the Ragged School Union established in 1844, came too from others in Mitchell’s family. Work of the schools was seen as ‘a modern mission’, with the child symbolizing change and living towards the future.180 Further reason behind Mitchell family generosity came from values inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment. Stress on learning and sociability flourished in Edinburgh when a centre of the Enlightenment. This emphasis anchored the mindset behind the social institutions, particularly those directed to learning, that developed and became part of culture at large in nineteenth-century Sydney. It is notable that Sir James Mackintosh, of Kyllachy (1765-1832), a close friend of Mitchell’s maternal grandfather, Dr. Helenus Scott (1760-1821), co-founded the Literary Society of Bombay.181 Lenore Coltheart and Peter Bridges skirt Enlightenment influences on New South Wales when looking at influences of the cultural and intellectual heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment upon Lachlan Macquarie (1761-1824), fifth Governor of New South Wales (1810-1821). David Lambert and Alan Lester coined the term ‘careering’ to encompass the intersections occurring among individuals traversing colonial spaces globally (like Helenus Scott and Mitchell’s father, James Mitchell

179 Background to the reformist schools comes from Roger Swift ‘Philanthropy and the children of the streets: the Chester Ragged School Society, 1851-1870’ in Victorian Chester: Essays in Social History 1830-1900, ed. Roger Swift (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 149-84; Background to the establishment and development of ragged schools in New South Wales, highlighting Scottish influences on their development, is given in Chris Murray, “The ragged school movement in New South Wales, 1860-1924” (M. A. diss, Macquarie University, 1979). See also, J. Ramsland, Children of the Backlanes: Destitute and Neglected Children in Colonial New South Wales (Kensington NSW: NSW University Press, 1986), 111-58. Practices in Sydney are comparable with those in London: Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 180 C. J. Montague, Sixty years in Waifdom; or, The Ragged School Movement in English History (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970), 167, 376. George Rusden led the establishment in Australia of the Gordon Memorial Fund, following its establishment in England in April 1885. In England, another family member, the Hon. Miss Murray, took deep interest in industrial schools about which she wrote a book dedicated to Prince Albert and the Queen, to whom she was in direct attendance. Chambers Edinburgh Journal 181 (June 19,1847), 399-400 cited in Montague, Waifdom, 110. On Murray, see Chanin, Book Life, 140. 181 On Macintosh see, Christopher J. Finlay, ‘Mackintosh, Sir James, of Kyllachy (1765–1832)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2010 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17620, (accessed March 2, 2011). For connection between Mackintosh and Governor Lachlan Macquarie see Diane Sylvester, ‘Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Sir James Mackintosh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, JACH 12 (2010): 23-38.

48 (1758-1929), and Sir James Mackintosh and Governor Macquarie).182 Lambert and Lester call for critical study of colonial philanthropy.183 They are concerned with historical geographies of imaginative and material connection, which they argue developed and maintained colonial philanthropic discourse in the British Empire primarily in the first half of the nineteenth century. They conceive of both colonial philanthropy and its alternative discourses as spatially extensive webs of communication (echoing Devir’s complex interconnected web of beliefs). ‘Distanced chains of cause and effect were integral to the philanthropic thoughts, gestures and interventions of Britons across the colonized world’ where philanthropy was imagined and shaped, ‘made and remade’, to produce ‘very different knowledges and imaginations’.184 They argue that philanthropy needs to be considered and deconstructed within an interconnected world. To what extent early nineteenth century associations in Australia (like subscription libraries) stemmed from Enlightenment beliefs in rationality, progress, sociability and well-being remains to be more fully established. Historian John Gascoigne has most usefully addressed the impact of the Enlightenment on politics,

religion and intellectual life in eighteenth century Australia.185 Cultural preoccupations of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British society are integral to an understanding of Mitchell and his views about philanthropy with Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and other like-minded contemporaries being part of the circle and networked society to which Mitchell’s family belonged. British structures and practices across government, law, and religion were transplanted to Australia; British modes of philanthropy were too.186 Australian

182 Lenore Coltheart and Peter Bridges, ‘The Elephant's Bed? Scottish Enlightenment Ideas and the Foundations of New South Wales’, Journal of Australian Studies 68 (June 2001): 19-33; David Lambert and Alan Lester, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006), 21-4, 26. 183 David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Geographies of colonial philanthropy’, Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 3 (2004), 320–341, particularly 321. 184 Lambert and Lester, ‘Geographies’, 321, 337. 185 John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); idem., Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); idem., Science in the Service of Empire, Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 186 This was inherent in the Victorian view of the Australian colonies as a ‘Greater Britain’ (as Marcus Clarke wrote in 1876: Marcus Clarke, ‘The Eight Hours’ Anniversary’, in The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume, ed., comp. Hamilton Mackinnon (Melbourne: Cameron, Laing & Co., 1884), 297- 300 (DSM/A828/C); Melanie Oppenheimer, Volunteering, Why we Can’t Survive Without It (Sydney:

49 historian Brian Fletcher among others have shown how philanthropy was embedded in colonial culture from its earliest days.187 Writing on religion, Fletcher illustrates how understanding of early colonial philanthropy rests in the laity who warrant more attention than they have received so far. Mitchell’s father, James Mitchell, was prominent among Sydney’s laity as was Judge Edward Wise (1818-1865), the uncle of Mitchell’s fiancé Emily Manning (1845-1890). Both men were among the network of free colonists on whom religious and philanthropic organizations in New South Wales relied heavily.188 Some of these benefactors held a record of philanthropic activity in England before reaching Australia: social work by newspaper editor and banker Edward Smith Hall (1786-1860) was noted by William Wilberforce (1759- 1833).189 Many of the individuals whom Fletcher lists were close associates of Mitchell’s father who arrived in Sydney in 1821; they could be seen to belong to the informational networks and circulations of colonial philanthropy that Lambert and Lester describe.190 The important role played by the new voluntary hospitals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in influencing public life and philanthropy has been established.191 James Mitchell gained experience in them before reaching Sydney, yet none of the material published so far on James Mitchell considers this

University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 17; Clark, British Clubs, 425-460.; Mark Lyons, Third Sector, 99. 187 Brian Fletcher, ‘Christianity and Free Society in New South Wales 1788-1840’, JRAHS 86, no. 2 (December 2001): 101.; Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156; Christopher Newell and Andy Calder, eds., Voices in Disability and Spirituality from the Land Down Under: Outback to Outfront (Binghampton, NY: The Haworth Press, 2004), 131.; Anita Selzer, Governor’s Wives in Colonial Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2002), 106. 188 Lyons, Third Sector, 100. 189 As editor of the Sydney Monitor (1828-1842), Hall championed liberty of the Press which was a contested issue during Governor Darling’s administration (1825-1831); Erin Leon Ihde, A Manifesto for New South Wales: Edward Smith Hall and the Sydney Monitor, 1826-1840 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004). 190 Fletcher, ‘Christianity’, 97, 104; Among Mitchell’s associates who were noted for their philanthropic work are Robert Campbell (1769-1846), Alexander Berry (1781-1873), and churchman Edward Collinson Close (1790-1866), former Engineer of Public Works in Newcastle. On Campbell as exemplar of Scottish trading networks see Richards, ‘Scottish networks’, 156; Also, Margaret Steven, Robert Campbell (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969); Barry John Bridges, ‘Aspects of the career of Alexander Berry, 1781-1873’ (Phd diss., University of Wollongong, 1992) online at http://ro,uow.edu.au/theses/1432 (accessed October 22, 2101); Lambert and Lester, ‘Geographies of colonial philanthropy’, 324-5. 191 Clark, British Clubs, 106-115; Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum visiting in historical perspective: Themes and Issues’, Clio Medica, Vol. 86 (2009): 21; Kathleen Wilson, ‘Urban culture and political activism in Hanoverian England: the example of voluntary hospitals’ in Eckhart Hellmuth, The Transformation of Political Culture, England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

50 background.192 This is despite his providing backing of different kinds in Sydney, from his occupation as colonial surgeon to his activity as commercial entrepreneur. Prentis singles Mitchell out as ‘the first notable Scottish coal mining investor and entrepreneur’ but greater interest in him stems from the degree of support and example that he gave to social enterprises across Sydney.193 His addition to these suggests a commitment to the transformative power of social enterprises.194 Philanthropy has long been linked to the making of civil society and nineteenth-century philanthropy was rooted in ideas about liberty and social justice from the Enlightenment era.195 Linking philanthropy with civility and the development of civil society has been widely covered across histories.196 Literature owned by David Scott Mitchell shows that he was imbued with the ‘civilizing process’ that was a feature of philanthropy besides being the constant theme of the Scottish Enlightenment.197 He was steeped in the link between voluntarism and democratic government. Patterns in his choice of reading reveal a keen sense of social responsibility and interest in civic development. Supporting Marcel Mauss’ findings, anthropologists Maurice Godelier and Michael Goddard highlight there is always a background of social reasons to giving, including the view that generosity has the potential for positive results.198 Moreover, Craig Calhoun targets a crucial variable: ‘the extent to which people experience their

192 Elizabeth Guilford, “Mitchell, James (1792-1869)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 235-238; C. E. Smith, Dr. James Mitchell (Newcastle, N.S.W.: Newcastle Public Library, Council of the City of Newcastle, 1966); A. M. McIntosh, The Case of Dr. James Mitchell (Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing, 1956). 193 Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 104. 194 G. D. Richardson, ‘The Colony's quest for a national library’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings 47, no. 2 (1961): 66-7; F. M. Bladen, Historical notes: The Public Library of New South Wales (1911): 2-3, 69; J. M. Forde, ‘The Genesis of commerce in Australia’ in Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings 3, part 12 (1917): 588-9. 195 Helmut K. Anheier, and Regina A. List. A Dictionary of Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Non- Profit Sector (London & New York: Routledge, 2005). 196 Martin Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in Nineteenth Century Bristol (London: Royal Historical Society, 1999); Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, Charity, Philanthropy and Civility in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dorothee Wimmer, ‘Bremen, Berline, Weimar: Cooperation between German art collectors and museum directors c.1900’, Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 2 (November 2009): 203-212. 197 Penny Fielding points to Scotch awareness of the historical relations of barbarism and civility, arguing that Scotland’s geography demonstrated stadial history from tribal hunting to commercial modernity. Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography, 3. 198 Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. N. Scott, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 45; Michael Goddard, “Of Cabbages and Kin: The Value of an Analytic Distinction between Gifts and Commodities,” Critique of Anthropology 20, no. 2, (2000): 147-148. Both support Mauss’s contentions.

51 social relations as ‘primordial’, or given immutably to them by the past or external forces, and the extent to which they are able to reconstitute their social and cultural lives together through their conscious action and communication with each other’.199 Texts that Mitchell owned both echo inherited views and suggest a depth to his interest in philanthropy and related issues. He read widely on them from Australian and northern hemisphere sources.200 Links between voluntarism and democratic governance are well established, as a number of scholars have outlined.201 While the secondary literature on the history of voluntarism in Australia is spare, one example that explores these links in the Australian context is George Nadel’s illustration of the contribution to cultural development made by the ubiquitous Mechanics’ Institutes established in Australia.202 Mitchell’s experience provides opportunity to consider this further. He participated in Sydney’s Mechanics’ Institute, established in 1833 and revived in the 1850s by George Kenyon Holden (1808-1874), an associate of James Mitchell and who was steeped in cooperatives.203 Mitchell’s uncles, Alexander Walker Scott (1800-1883) and George William Rusden (1819-1903) were respectively the founding treasurer of the Newcastle Mechanics’ Institute (established

199 Craig Calhoun, ‘The Public Good as a Social and Cultural Project’ in Walter W. Powell and Elisabeth S. Clemens, eds., Private Action and the Public Good (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998), 26. 20-35. 200 Examples include, S. W. Brooks, Charity and philanthropy: a prize essay (historical, statistical and general), on the institutions in Sydney which aim at the diminution of vice, or the alleviation of misery, and are supported wholly, or in part, by the gifts of the charitable. (Sydney: W.B. Campbell, 1878) (DSM/024/P24); Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883) (DSM/042/P565); Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, the Condition and Earning of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London: Griffin, 1866) (DSM/331.8M). 201 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 466. Angela M. Eikenberry, Giving Circles: Philanthropy, Voluntary Association, and Democracy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Brian Howard Harrison, ‘Civil society by accident? Paradoxes of voluntarism and pluralism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ in Jose Harris, Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 79-96; Daniel Bivona, ‘Poverty, Pity, and Community: Urban Poverty and the Threat to Social Bonds in the Victorian Age’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 21 (2007): 67-83. 202 George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture, Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). A comparative example in terms of urbanism is: Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society, Bradford 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 203 George Kenyon Holden, The Moral and Intellectual Culture of the People, essential to secure the advantage of high wages and political privileges: a lecture (Sydney: Printed at the "Empire" Office, 1853) (DSM/041/P16); Brett Fairbairn, ‘Self-help and philanthropy: the emergence of cooperatives in Britain, Germany, the United States, and Canada from mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century’, in Philanthropy Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, ed. Thomas Adam (Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 2004), 55-78.

52 in 1835) and an active supporter of the Mechanics’ Institutes in Victoria.204 When considering Mitchell family involvement with groupings like the Mechanics’ Institutes the view held by Scottish economic and social historian R. J. Morris should be borne in mind. He sees that the creation of voluntary societies, often with a philanthropic purpose, were crucial in processes of class formation and emerging group identities in the early industrial city (such as nineteenth century Sydney was).205 Indeed there has been an increasing tendency to emphasize the capacity of philanthropic effort as a unifying, conciliatory force, embracing those from different cultural backgrounds in the exercise of shared values and identity. Brian Harrison’s work on charity emphasizes how values across social classes (of the workers and the elite) could be remarkably similar.206 Philanthropic effort (like the Mechanics’ Institutes) reflected a process of mutual recognition and negotiation. Tom Devine notes that this similarity was the case in Scotland up to the early 1770s where a ‘civic humanism’ held sway, which stressed the responsibilities of the elite and saw landlords cooperating to suppress vagrancy and ensure that the poor of each parish received support.207 Certainly voluntary associational organizations (like the Mechanics’ Institutes and those shown in Appendix 10) were a feature of colonial support for cultural, commercial and welfare purposes. Focusing on Australian history, Mark Lyons noted the powerful tradition of pragmatic commitment to collective action. The spirit of mutual support generated in Australia a flourishing of friendly societies, trade unions, farmers’ cooperatives and other mutual associations.208 This was only to be expected in the context of the mid- Victorian period when as Martin Daunton explains voluntarism was preferred over state action which was contained. It was widely believed ‘that cultural provision, as with welfare and economic enterprise, should be left to voluntary impulse’.209 Libraries – run as social ventures and consisting of networks that indicated the strength of community relationships – generated significant and enduring social

204 A Mechanics’ Institute was established in Melbourne in 1838. By 1900 there were about 1000 Mechanics’ Institutes established in Australia. For Rusden’s advocacy see, A. G. Austin, George William Rusden and National Education in Australia, 1849-1862 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1958). 205 R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary societies and British urban elites, 1780-1870: an analysis’, Historical Journal, 24 (1982): 95-118. 206 Harrison, ‘Philanthropy’, 353-374. 207 Devine, The Scottish Nation, 102. 208 Lyons, Third Sector, 99, 101. 209 Daunton, The Organization of Knowledge, 20-21.

53 capital. An example of this and the power of social enterprises is given in the context of America by John Cole.210 Like his father and others in his family when supporting institutions in their day, Mitchell was clearly aware that he was laying the foundations of an Australian future when building for an institution of culture like the Public Library of New South Wales (as he knew today’s State Library of New South Wales).211

2.4 Building the public sphere in civil society The work of Jürgen Habermas on the development in the West of the public sphere is often used as a framework in discussion of philanthropy in relation to his analysis of the growth of institutions of influence on public debate. Habermas’ text on the relationship of state and civil society from the seventeenth century conceptualizes the social nature and foundations of public life. His effort to understand the history, foundations, and internal processes of public discourse (where middle-class groups proposed public opinion as the source for public policy) traces the transformation of social and political institutions when the lines between the private and public spheres blurred as they did with philanthropy. Margaret Menninger draws on Habermas’ analysis in her outline of how cultural institutions developed in nineteenth century Germany where state involvement was ‘much more easily implemented than in Britain’.212 Menninger studied the process of benefaction in terms of the role it played in developing urban and civil society, bourgeois culture and regional identity. Comparative focus comes from Dorothee Wimmer on German art museums at the turn of the century.213 Wimmer portrayed social elites motivated by philanthropic social and cultural accountability. Both studies explore diverging views about philanthropy (as between Wimmer’s private collectors and city museum directors) while illustrating that philanthropy is culturally specific, ‘always influenced by

210 John Y. Cole, ‘Store houses and Workshops: American Libraries and the Uses of Knowledge’, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, eds. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), 364-85. 211 The Free Public Library was instituted in 1869 when the government absorbed the Australian Subscription Library. The institution’s name was changed to the Public Library of New South Wales in 1895 and the State Library of New South Wales in 1975. 212 Menninger, Art and Civic Patronage); Daunton, Knowledge, 21. 213 Wimmer, ‘Bremen – Berlin –Weimar’, 203-12.

54 cultural and historical context’ (as Payton and Moody noted).214 Menninger’s case studies illustrate philanthropy in the different spheres of visual art, theatre and music as occurred at three different cultural sites. She demonstrates the structures and organizational practices of patronage, besides views about these structures and practices as and when these changed. Centred on the museums, theatres and concert halls of late nineteenth-century Leipzig, Menninger shows how the structure of benefaction evolved. Initially the endowment of culture was exercised as a ‘private’ activity, achieved through bourgeois association. Over time patronage of cultural activity (cultural philanthropy) became more state-centered and (especially more municipally-organized). Cultural philanthropy (the exercise of supporting cultural bodies) became an institution of culture that was key to urban cultural life. She illustrates how Leipzig’s museums, theatres and concert halls became public property in a development that is attributed partly to the desire by the urban elite to keep crowds out of public houses (an issue of social control) but also attributed to civic identity and local pride (much as John Archer illustrates in Manchester). In this sense, late nineteenth century cultural bodies were the result of what historians see as a diffusion of social thinking and a matter of public engagement.215 Engagement with print through the century was behind this, as it was behind supportive action. It has been thoroughly documented how the Victorians were caught up in an exploding ‘knowledge economy’; chasing economic opportunity fed their hunger for information. This, and technological advances like the rotary printing press, altered their consumption of information and popularised knowledge.216 From the long eighteenth-century, reading was an essential tool for economic development, prosperity and civic amity; it was also a tool for personal liberation and political

214 Payton & Moody, Philanthropy, 95. 215 Daunton, Knowledge, 22.; Habermas, Structural Transformation, 182. 216 Best pictured in Australia by the uptake of the telegraph: K. T. Livingston, The Wired Nation Continent, the Communication Revolution and Federating Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996); A wider view of this comes from Alex Nalbach, “The software of empire”: telegraphic news agencies and imperial publicity, 1865-1914 in Imperial Co-Histories, National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). On the structures of economic opportunity and the hunger for innovation see Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On mechanized printing and paper-making see James Raven, ‘The changing structure of publishing’ in Daunton, Knowledge, 276-7; On the appeal of newspapers see David McKitterick, ‘Libraries Knowledge and Public Identity’, in Daunton, Knowledge, 309.

55 awakening.217 The history of reading through the eighteenth century and into the late Victorian period has generated a significant literature.218 Scholars such as David Allen, Richard B. Sher and William St. Clair have analysed the significance of reading and literate culture.219 Sher shows the widespread expansion of print.220 He illustrates how the books of the Scottish Enlightenment were put forth in the world during the second half of the eighteenth century through collaborative activity and interactive response that was an outward and downward transmission of polite literature and learning besides patriotic promotion of Edinburgh’s Enlightenment circles.221 Allen and St. Clair illustrate how important print culture was to the British Enlightenment. Vic Gatrell and James Raven further address this influence.222 Analysing the changing structure of publishing, Raven mapped individuals who worked in the book trade, principally in London, over four centuries up to 1850. Family unions were a feature of the increasingly commercial business of books. Technological advances permeated publishing so that Thomas Carlyle fulminated that books were ‘written and sold by machinery’. Literature was part of the changing organization of knowledge in the Victorian world (in which printed literature became widespread and accessible from the first half of the nineteenth century).223 The role of women likewise assumed vital significance to philanthropism. Accordingly women in Mitchell’s circle gave further example of the importance of

217 David Allen, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London: British Library, 2008), 124. 218 For an introduction to the American context see Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, eds., Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); For an example of this scholarship, see Christine Pawley’s Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and her more recent analysis of prominent research models in the history of reading: ‘Beyond Market Models and Resistance Organizations as a Middle Layer in the History of Reading’, Library Quarterly 79 (January 2009): 73–93. 219 David Allen, Making British Culture, English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment 1740–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008); William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 220 Alexander Murdoch and Richard B. Sher, ‘Literacy and Learned Culture’ in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison, People and Society in Scotland, vol. 1, 1760-1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers in association with The Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, 1988), 127-142. 221 Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 607-8. 222 Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter, Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (Atlantic Books, 2006); On 19th century features of bookselling see James Raven, The Business of Books, Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (Yale University Press, 2007), 320-350 223 Raven, Business, 371; James Raven, ‘’The Changing Structure of Publishing’ in Martin Daunton, Knowledge, 272, 280.

56 philanthropy to his family. His grandmother was imbued with the tradition of Enlightenment philanthropy. Augusta Scott’s (1775-1840) childhood was spent amongst the circle of bluestockings who included Hannah More (1745-1833), Sarah Scott (1720-1795) and Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800). They made charity an important activity for women in the Victorian era. Dorice Elliott and Frank Prochaska have influentially explained how associational activity by women engaged in philanthropic activity was reformist.224 Women’s engagement in social welfare altered how the woman’s sphere was socially defined in the nineteenth century, expanded, improved the status of women and changed social relations.225 Women’s studies have established how women’s engagement in social welfare and their writing about it allow glimpses into the ‘middle class’ culture of the Victorian era. As Prochaska observes from the correspondence of philanthropist and suffragist Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon) (1827-1891), both sexes came to learn to work together in a benevolent cause.226 The role of women in philanthropy through the nineteenth century in Australia has been widely studied across different contexts.227 As Judith Godden asserts, knowledge of woman’s sphere philanthropy is essential to understanding of nineteenth-century life (in which philanthropy played a large part).228 Brian Fletcher shows the involvement of Sydney women in 18 philanthropic causes before 1850.229 Mitchell’s mother was prominent among them.230 R. Teale supports Fletcher’s view of the significant supportive action that the laity took in developing the colonial

224 F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Dorice Williams Elliot, The Angel out of the House, Women’s Philanthropy and the Redefinition of Gender in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England (Boston: Johns Hopkins, 1994). 225 Simon Morgan, A Victorian Woman's Place, Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century London (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007); Sarah Richardson, ‘Women, Philanthropy and Imperialism in Nineteenth-century Britain’, in Helen Gilbert & Chris Tiffin, eds., Burden or Benefit? Imperial Benevolence and its Legacies (Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 90-102. 226 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 32. 227 Annette Shiell, Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork, Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 2009); Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England, from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1994). 228 Judith Godden, Philanthropy and the Woman's Sphere, Sydney, 1870-circa 1900 (PhD diss., Macquarie University, 1983) http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/37176 (accessed October 9, 2010); B. J. Gleeson, ‘A Public Space for Women: The Case of Charity in Colonial Melbourne’, Area, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September, 1995): 193-207. 229 Fletcher, ‘Christianity’, 107. 230 See chapter 4, p. 134; Chanin, Book Life, 253.

57 church.231 The pressure (from propagandists like Hannah More) to contribute was ‘unrelenting’ among women (as Frank Prochaska reminds us), and women were known as ‘the most zealous instruments’ of a cause.232 Marion Diamond focuses on the single example given by the social reformer Maria Rye (1829-1903). Diamond shows the interaction in British Philanthropy with liberal feminism through focusing on Rye’s association with the ‘Langham Place group’ in London during the 1850s. This was known to Mitchell’s fiancée, the pioneer journalist Emily Heron née Manning.233 Langham Place society revived bluestocking ideals of rational value, women’s rights and their advancement, and literary independence. Feminism and philanthropy intertwined in Rye’s and Heron’s activities, as they did with the person to whom Mitchell was closest, his cousin, the social activist Rose Scott (1847-1925). Rye’s efforts went to women’s and children’s emigration (through the Society for Promoting Women's Employment); Scott’s efforts secured the franchise for women in New South Wales and improved benefits for children, as her biographer outlined.234 Philanthropic pursuits opened entry into local government and the professions for many late nineteenth century women. Their philanthropic experience ‘was a lever which they used to open the doors closed to them in other spheres, for in its variety it was experience applicable to just about every profession in England’.235 Candida Lacey, in her attention to philanthropist and suffragist Barbara Bodichon, shows how inter-connected members from reformist circles like theirs were.236 So too were literary circles. Writers like Dickens and Trollope, who were key

231 R. Teale, ‘Matron, Maid and Missionary, The Work of Anglican Women in Australia’ in Sabine Willis, ed., Women, Faith and Fetes, Essays in the History of Women and the Church in Australia (Mulgrave, 1977), 118-20, 105-107. 232 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 39-40. 233 Marion Diamond, Emigration and empire: the life of Maria S. Rye (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999); Sally O'Neill, ‘Manning, Emily Matilda (1845 - 1890)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5 (Melbourne University Press, 1974), 204; Patricia Clarke, Pen Portrait, Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 97, 113-116, 217; Sheila R. Herstein, ‘The English woman's journal and the Langham Place circle: a feminist forum and its women editors’ in Joel H. Wiener. ed., Innovators and Preachers, the Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 61ff. 234 Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott, Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). 235 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 227. 236 Candida Ann Lacey, ed., Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (London: Routledge, 2001), 62, 79.; Close connections are also seen among later Bloomsbury activists. See, David Morgan, ‘Cultural work and friendship work: the case of ‘Bloomsbury’, Media Culture and Society 4(1982): 19-32.

58 in shaping nineteenth century views, were known to Mitchell family members, several of whom were known for their own publications.237 Published women writers in Mitchell’s circle like Emily Heron highlighted the need ‘to work for humanity’.238 Mitchell lived through a crucial time in terms of the re-figuring of philanthropy. He was familiar with the distinctions as they evolved in his lifetime between philanthropy (as charity, or support of the less fortunate) and patronage (as the support of high culture), much as Mordechai Feingold mapped out.239 However, Feingold stresses that motives behind benefaction are complex (as Mitchell’s case shows), thus making it necessary to scrutinize motives in any discussion of benefaction. Feingold outlines that private support led to meritorious results in the nineteenth-century (much like Menninger and Archer found in Leipzig and Manchester respectively). However, while private interests once supported initiatives intended for social well-being (following eighteenth century models), complexities were such by the mid-nineteenth century that more than personal giving was required. The state was obliged to become directly involved in the development of cultural institutions (like libraries). By the early twentieth century, public money supporting public libraries ‘while not replacing private patronage, nonetheless regulated culture by supplementing private support with its own resources’.240 The secondary literature on cultural philanthropy is poor and not concerted, each discipline having its own focus. The term ‘cultural philanthropy’ appears little used until recently, beyond reference to museums. Andrew Hemingway links the term to cultural capital, Jeffrey Abt uses the term ‘cultural philanthropy’ in the context of museum history, Geoff Ginn in the context of late nineteenth century London’s East End, and Alan Kidd considers how the charitable relationship permeated Victorian

237 T. H. S. Escott, Anthony Trollope, His Work, Associates and Literary Originals (London: John Lane, 1913), 308; 347; P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope's Son in Australia: the Life and Letters of F. J. A. Trollope (1847-1910) (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1982); Coral Lansbury, ‘Charles Dickens and His Australia’, Journal of Royal Australian Historical Association 2 Pt. 2 (June 1966). 238 M.I.S.T., Annine: A Novel (London: T. Cautley Newby, 1871) (DSM/A823/S); Spray, Pearl and Willie (Sydney: John Woods, 1880)(DSM/A823/S); See also Emily Heron (‘Australie’), The balance of pain and other poems (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877)(DSM/A821/C) online at http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/v00040 (accessed September 2, 2010). 239 Mordechai Feingold, "Philanthropy, pomp, and patronage: historical reflections upon the endowment of culture". Daedalus 116, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 165. 240 Feingold, "Philanthropy’, 176.

59 social fabric and cultural practices.241 It appears that relatively few Australian scholars study the history of cultural philanthropy. Australian historians have given the greatest attention to social (hence charitable or welfare) philanthropy.242 In Australia there is a paucity of dissertation study into historical background to cultural philanthropy.243 Crucially, the need for and practice of philanthropy occupied a more central position in the Australian colonies than elsewhere because Australia did not introduce a Poor Law. Therefore, philanthropy played a central role in nation building in the Australian colonies as Shurlee Swain has argued. She stressed that much of the historical debate around nineteenth-century philanthropy ‘has dismissed its claim to benevolence and emphasized its engagement with class and social control.’244 This debate (far from subtle, as Swain sees it) highlighted ‘the degree to which power relations were central to philanthropy’ (in perhaps a somewhat negative and outmoded response to paternalism). Swain focused on Victoria, but the situation in nineteenth-century Sydney was similar, where voluntarism from those who prospered in the colonies supported essential community services (beyond prisons, psychiatric hospitals and basic provision for neglected children). These services were provided by public charities that were buttressed by individuals (like Mitchell) and underwritten by Government subsidies.245 Generally speaking, a private-public partnership existed through the nineteenth century whereby funds raised by citizens for an effort, whether to administer relief or to memorialize colonial foundations, would be matched by government. Dollar matching suited Victorian belief in self-help and reflected Samuel Smiles’ rhetoric about the work ethic and helping others that so significantly stamped

241 Jeffrey Abt, ‘The Origins of the Public Museum’ in A Companion to Museum Studies ed. Sharon Macdonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), chapter 8 especially 123-133; Geoff Ginn, ‘Gifts of Culture in the Late-Victorian East End’ University of Queensland Historical Proceedings 14 (2003): 13-31; On giving as a cultural performance see Kidd, ‘Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm’’, 17. 242 M. J. Heale, ‘Patterns of benevolence: Associated philanthropy in the cities of New York, 1830- 1860’, New York History 57, no. 1 (January 1976): 53-79. 243 Australian Digital Theses (October 2010) lists no records to match the subject heading ‘cultural philanthropy’. Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT) Database, http://adr.caul.edu.au/ [accessed October 24, 2010]. 244 Shurlee Swain, ‘Religion, Philanthropy and Social Reform, Meanings, Motivations and Interactions in the Lives of Nineteenth Century Australian Women’, Women-Church, no 23 (1998): 29. 245 Swain, ‘Religion’, 29.; Lyons, Third Sector, 100; Garton, ‘Rights’, 28: Garton estimated that government subsidies covered up to three-quarters of charities’ operational costs.

60 Victorian perspective from 1859.246 As Thomas Adam says, Victorians viewed philanthropy as being most effective only when both sides – giver and receiver – would gain something from it. Receiving a limited return (maximum of 5 percent) was seen as not only acceptable but honourable and “truly philanthropic”. It was assumed that this “true philanthropy” would provide the people who depended on philanthropy with a certain degree of independence and self-respect. Philanthropy and 5 Percent thus was seen as more helpful than pure philanthropy.’247 This was the principle by which Mitchell’s uncle, David Scott, operated the Lisgar Training School. Parents of the girls housed there contributed to the education of their children because this was seen as the ‘best safeguard against their benevolent intentions being marred by engendering a spirit of pauperism.’248 Consequently, with this joint-effort principle in mind, Mitchell insisted that Government should match his bequest. He would give Sydney the library that he believed it should have, so long as the state would erect the building that the city needed for a proper public library. This matched Carnegie’s opinion that in the interests of the long-term well-being of a repository like a library it was essential to instill community sense of ownership in it. Ellen Lagemann explains how the star- spangled Scotsman’s goal to create the ‘ladders upon which the aspiring can rise’ (such as libraries) envisaged that citizens should be ‘joint’ proprietors of these ladders.249 Surveying the history of Australia’s natural history museums Kohlstedt shows how vital individual leadership was to their development, a view that Susan Sheets- Pyenson matches. Both also note that the 1880s and early 1890s were a period of prosperity and productivity for cultural institutions (like museums and libraries) that would not be again matched for half a century because the depression of the 1890s

246 Gary Day, ‘Past and Present: The Case of Samuel Smiles’Self-Help’ in Gary Day, ed., Varieties of Victorianism, the Uses of a Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 1-25, particularly p.8; R. J. Morris, ‘Samuel Smiles and Victorian values: a journey from Haddington to Leeds and London’, Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists’ Society, 22 (1993): 63-80. 247 Adam, Respectability, 54-5. See also Lyons, Third Sector, 100. 248 Rosamund and Florence Hill, What We Saw in Australia, 331 cited in Ramsland, Children of the Back Lanes, 182. 249 Ellen Condiffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: the Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy and Public Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 17, 23.

61 brought an abrupt halt to expansion and tested public commitment.250 How integral private support was to the growth of cultural institutions has been pictured in terms of the Macleay Museum with Julian Holland and Peter Stanbury demonstrating how Sydney naturalist William John Macleay (1820-1891) was ‘an enthusiastic collection builder’.251 Kathleen Fennessy extends understanding of the development of the colonial museum and cultural institutions by her picture of how the public in Victoria engaged with their museums.252 Concepts of supportive action were tied to building these cultural institutions. Like Menninger found in Leipzig and Archer found in Manchester, civic identity and local pride were part of this. Largely in cases of Australia’s cultural institutions members of the colonial elite (like Mitchell) took the initiative expecting the State to match their support. Northern hemisphere studies show that establishing libraries and museums had important educational benefits that benefitted national prosperity. Helen Meller presents philanthropy as a tool for providing resources for cultural and social public institutions.253 This was one of the reasons why they ultimately became a government responsibility in Europe.254 Likewise in the colonies. Laying the Public Library’s foundation stone Joseph Carruthers declared that the new Library would be the complement of the Public school ‘which will carry on the work which the schools have begun’.255 Helen Meller credits philanthropic effort with sustaining an international discussion on the future of life in large cities by way of international exhibitions like the Australian International Exhibition (1879). Paul Greenhalgh’s study of world fairs shows how the international and civic exhibitions over the fifty years before the First World War ‘nurtured an idealism in the search for a better environment’ that in turn

250 Kohlstedt, ‘Australian Museums’, 15-16; Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science, 95, 98; Vaughan, ‘Philanthropy before Felton’, 6. 251 Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay, Museum: the Macleay Family: Their Collection and the Search for Order (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2007). This follows an earlier view: Peter Stanbury and Julian Holland, Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet: the History of the Macleays and Their Museum (Sydney: Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, 1988), 55. 252 Kathleen Fennessy, A People Learning: Colonial Victorians and their Public Museums 1860- 1880 (North Melbourne, Vic.:Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007). 253 Helen Meller, ‘Philanthropy and public enterprise: International exhibitions and the modern town planning movement, 1889-1913’, Planning Perspective 10, no. 3 (1995): 295-310 particularly 295-6, 301, 307. 254 Judith Elizabeth Pitts, Science and Public Museums: Some Nineteenth Century Connections (B.A. (Hons.) diss, Griffith University, 1990). Roy Macleod, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). 255 ‘Mitchell Library’, SMH, 12 September 1906, 9.

62 ‘provided a somewhat unfocused context for philanthropic action’.256 Late nineteenth century rhetoric and competitiveness fed cultural institutions like libraries and museums. Philanthropy in its new, modern guise, was no longer limited to relieving the poor but became a tool for solving the social problems of industrialization. Helen Meller’s reading of ‘wholesale philanthropy’ as a modernist feature contrasts with Thomas Adam’s reading of philanthropy as a conservative instrument pursued for personal social advantage and central to legitimizing a new urban upper class. Meller sees nineteenth century philanthropists as ‘conservative reformers’, middle- and upper-class citizens financing reforms within the framework of existing systems of municipal societies to prevent revolutionary change. Meller presents fin-de-siècle philanthropy as a force behind change, injecting direction into moribund governments. Multi-millionaire industrialists like J. D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) and Andrew Carnegie changed philanthropy by their requirement that efforts qualifying for their support (such as to further knowledge or educational activities) be organized. Their joint-effort ‘wholesale’ philanthropy engaged public enterprise and became the engine for reform. When read in this context, Mitchell’s stand was timely. Researchers like Mark Lyons and Dan Weinbren and Bob James agree with Brian Fletcher’s view of the deep-rootedness of philanthropy in colonial Australia.257 They see altruism as shaped by culture and circumstance (like Menninger and Wimmer found). For Lyons, the formation of philanthropic support and organizational structures can only be explained ‘by recognizing that people's actions are shaped by social factors as much as by economic ones’.258 Key to this view is the interplay of changing activity within social, political and economic institutions that (as occurred in Mitchell’s experience) ‘are transformed, usually slowly, sometimes abruptly, by the complex interactions of actors whose actions are shaped by those

256 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World Fairs 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 12-25. These arguments have been tied to the modern town planning movement of 1889-1913 but are similarly tied to debate over modernity: Chris Hopkins, ‘Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition’ in Varieties of Victorianism, ed. Gary Day (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Peter Proudfoot and Roslyn Maguire, Colonial City, Global City: Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879 (Darlinghurst, N.S.W.: Crossing Press, 2000). 257 Daniel Weinbren & Bob James, ‘Getting a Grip: The Roles of Friendly Societies in Australia and Britain Reappraised’, Labor History 88 (May 2005), 87-103, especially 88, 101. 258 Lyons, ‘The history of non-profit organisations’, 324.

63 institutions themselves.’259 To reiterate, philanthropy history in Australia is generally embedded in and limited to organizational histories. Mark Lyons was a critical voice, dismayed at the methodological inadequacies like the lack of context in these studies.260 A spate of publications within the last decade devoted to Australian philanthropists that are largely biographical in nature represent the literature that Lyons criticized.261 He argued that biographies of philanthropic actors, whether from historical or more recent time, are in general journalistic in presentation. They dwell on a biographic narrative, lack contextual analysis and are generally hagiographic. Lyons considered that most are no more than ‘celebratory chronicles, the great majority by amateur historians or journalists’.262 Few, he said, offer a more historiographic and critical approach. He called for better contextual histories. Social historian Kenneth L. Kusmer had earlier attributed the neglect of aspects of philanthropy as due to the ‘unusual combination of talents or interests required’ to study these appropriately. He points to the lack of attention given to elite involvement in cultural activities by historical sociologists like E. Digby Baltzell (a student of upper-class life), and to the disinterest shown by art historians in the analysis of social groups, status concerns or changing social structure. To Kusmer, both angles of vision are needed for socio-cultural history which requires ‘an interdisciplinary approach that will pay attention both to the history of artistic ideals and to upper-class life and institutional bureaucracies.’263 Lyons charged Australian historians with being largely blind to the ‘complex process of organising and institution building of any kind’, despite Australia having a higher proportion of human services provided by non-profit activity than almost any other country. In his view failure to be interdisciplinary and more than one-eyed (as

259 Lyons, ‘The history of non-profit organisations’, 324. 260 Mark Lyons & G. Nowland Foreman, ‘Civil society and social capital in Australia and New Zealand’, in Helmet Anheier & Stefan Toepler (Eds.) International Encyclopedia of Civil Society (New York: Springer, 2009), online at http://www.ebook3000.com/International-Encyclopedia-of- Civil-Society_30354.html (accessed September 15, 2010); Mark Lyons’s, Third Sector (2001) was the first comprehensive study of Australia’s third sector. He urged that much research waits to be done. 261 Stephen Utick, Captain Charles, Engineer of Charity: the Remarkable Life of Charles Gordon O'Neill (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2008); Peter Yule, Ian Potter: A Biography (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2006). 262 Mark Lyons, ‘ The History of Philanthropy and Non Profits: A Comment’, Third Sector Review 4, no. 2 (1998): 23. 263 Kenneth L. Kusner, ‘The Social History of Cultural Institutions: The Upper-Class Connection’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 1 (Summer, 1979): 146.

64 Kusmer suggests) ‘has led to a great deal of nonsense’.264 Scholars like Fletcher and Lyons indicate that better historical knowledge could throw some interesting light on Australian generosity. Instructional value linked activity (as it linked benefaction from Mitchell, Felton and Myer). In Gaunt’s assessment of philanthropic Tasmanians (such as William Walker), their philanthropic motives were tied with the view that the public library would give ‘opportunities for self-education, would provide access to social and political ideas ... [and] would promote progress and prosperity’.265 Recent library historiography has recognized that public library development in Britain and the United States has owed much to philanthropic assistance. It supplemented state or municipal subsidization that was in many cases inadequate (as was the case in Sydney). Appreciation of this matters when librarians have not always recognized the value of retaining materials that document their institutions’ own past.266 Comprehensive analysis of Mitchell’s role in this history is lacking. Most useful to the purpose of research into Mitchell is sense of the term understood by Helen Horwitz who anchors the term to cultural institutions and their development in the urban setting. She addresses the institutions established in fin-de-siècle Chicago. These were ‘designed for the whole city’ as part of cultural uplift.267 The individuals who were behind them ‘turned to cultural philanthropy…to accomplish social goals’. They adopted civic responsibility for culture because it was anticipated that the institutions that they fostered would ‘generate a civic renaissance’. Horwitz points out how the native-born elite of Chicago assumed a responsibility for culture, at the close of the nineteenth century. They ‘felt a sense of community responsibility for culture’ although their ‘active involvement demanded economic resources greater than many of the older generation of leaders or their sons could supply’.268 More than assuming responsibility ‘for shaping the cultural opportunities’ of Chicago as a whole, ‘cultural

264 Lyons, ‘The History of Philanthropy’, 24. 265 Heather Gaunt, ‘”To do things for the good of others”: library philanthropy, William Walker, and the establishment of the Australiana collection at the Tasmanian Public Library in the 1920s and 1930s, The Australian Library Journal 56, no. 3-2 (November 2007): 246; Interestingly, from 1912 (two years after the opening of the Mitchell Library), Walker established the habit of an annual period of residence in Sydney. He spent a large portion of his time in the Mitchell Library, researching and transcribing Australian manuscripts and books. 266 Christine Pawley, ‘Stimulating Scholarship: Library History Round Table’s Research Forum 2005’, Libraries & the Cultural Record, vol, 41 no. 3 (Summer 2006): 393. 267 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture & The City, Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976), x. 268 Horowitz, Culture, 47,45.

65 philanthropy became an instrument these men used to come to terms with the hopes and fears they held for their city’.269 Her study explores aspects of the social situation of their context that channeled the drive for culture into civic institutions. She placed cultural philanthropy in the tradition of voluntary associations and concluded that Chicago’s cultural philanthropists (who ‘modeled themselves after the image of the cultivated gentleman’) were ‘intensely loyal’ to the city where they had prospered and ‘wanted for Chicago the recognition due a cultural capital.’270 To them the library was a repository of culture, where ‘the soul of the past is ready to impart intelligence and experience to the living’.271 It would be ‘the visual expression of the civic consciousness’ of the city.272 Implied behind their intention was the belief that the collections of cultural institutions were designed to reshape public taste, and present works of art and intellect rather than to provide entertainment or economic gain. By definition, the cultural institution housed art or science rather than entertainment.273 Their action was communitarian in that they viewed the public good as a social and cultural project, understood in terms of social relations and culture, where the city could ‘suggest and inspire’.274

269 Horowitz, Culture, 48. 270 Horowitz, Culture, 68. 271 Horowitz, Culture, 122. 272 Horowitz, Culture, 26. 273 Horowitz, Culture, 91, 100, 104. 274 Horowitz, Culture, 78.

66 Chapter Three Methodology

Knowledge of Mitchell has been limited so far. The picture that has been formed is based on anecdotal observations of him made during his last years when he was ‘a figure of respect, even awe’ (Appendix 3).1 These portray Mitchell as reclusive and unsociable; he was immobilised and in considerable pain. Eighty years later librarians such as Anne Robertson relied on these published reports, believing they were from ‘the very few people Mitchell allowed into his home at 17 Darlinghurst Road [that we base our knowledge of it], and they were mostly booksellers and at least one librarian’.2 She was referring to booksellers Fred Wymark and James R. Tyrrell who were close to 40 years younger than their foremost customer to whom they could only have been deferential. Their accounts were written retrospectively, many years after their immediate experience of Mitchell. H. C. L. Anderson (1853-1924), Public Librarian of New South Wales, allegedly visited Mitchell every Friday from 1899 to c.1905 but their relationship was strained and the unreliability of Anderson’s reports are chronicled.3 The future arts critic Bertram Stevens spent Friday evenings with Mitchell between 1904 and 1906. Stevens, a legal clerk at the time, left the fullest picture of Mitchell in his last years.4 Despite the time that Mitchell gave him, Stevens acknowledged the difficulty of knowing Mitchell: Stevens wrote that he would have enjoyed very different conversation had the 36 year gap in their age not existed.5 Their accounts have been drawn on ad nauseam. Little effort appears to have been made to identify further evidence against which these reports can be tested. These accounts should be read in terms of Barbara J. Shapiro’s qualification concerning hearsay testimony in Anglo-American law. She considered views of evidence and proof in Anglo-American law and how they came to be. From medieval times ‘the credibility of witnesses was related to social and economic status as well as to the opportunity to observe firsthand the fact in question’. This led to the value system of the era being ‘incorporated into the system of proof’. Consequently,

1 Jones, ‘Relations’, 26. 2 Robertson, ‘Passion’, 118. 3 J. R. Nelson, ‘H. C. L. Anderson, Principal Librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales 1893-1906: His Achievements and Significance’ (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 1991); Jones, ‘Relations’, 25-6. 4 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’. 5 ibid., 58.

68 hearsay testimony was excluded from then on in both continental and English legal systems.6 As Shapiro would see them, these sources on Mitchell are socially tainted, and therefore hardly critical, and lack credibility. Unlike anecdotal narrative, historical narrative critically examines the truthfulness of historical memory through establishing facts and seeking explanations. Verifying fact and causality guards against flaws that may exist in anecdotal recollection. Historical narrative guards against clouded judgements. This is important when cultural stereotypes inherited from the Victorian Age could cloud judgements about it just as retrospective accounts can cloud memories. Victorianists John Kuchich and Dianne Sadoff remind us that nineteenth century writers developed indelible social stereotypes of the Victorian Age that carry into present-day representations. These created ‘cultural conventions [which] no longer express the truth of the subject…so much as misrepresent, block, and stigmatize that truth and in the process often render it monstrous’.7 Perhaps because of these stereotypes, an aloofness has been held by historians of nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand towards their Victorian intellectual and cultural heritage. Social historian Miles Fairburn, summing up the state of Victorian studies in Australia and New Zealand in 2004, points to how unfashionable such study has been. Victorian studies ‘had almost no local content’ because historians of nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand ‘take surprisingly little interest in the Victorian cultural and intellectual heritage of their respective societies.’8 As far as he could determine in 2004, scholars’ ‘conference themes and essay collections have never covered the generic subject of Victorian intellectual and cultural influences in New Zealand and Australia.’ Fairbairn sums up that Victorian studies are unfashionable because Victorian values ‘as a whole are vilified for creating the modern sins of racism, colonialism and sexism – in particular, for establishing the ideas that motivated the agents of the sins.’9 He reflects that historical vision can be hampered by fashion and the zeitgeist.

6 Barbara Shapiro, ‘“Beyond Reasonable Doubts” and “Probable Cause” in Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 188. 7 John Kuchich & Dianne F Sadoff, eds., Victorian Afterlife Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2000), 315. 8 Miles Fairburn, ‘The state of Victorian studies in Australia and New Zealand’ in The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations, Revisions, ed. Miles Taylor & Michael Wolff (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 230-1. 9 Fairburn, ‘Victorian studies’, 239.

69 Equally, the historiography of intellectual and social history shows how historical inquiry is not immune to modishness. Both forms of inquiry have endured fluctuating favour. Intellectual history (also referred to as the history of ideas) is a term that is widely applied to a host of enquiries addressing the articulation of ideas in the past. Marxist-influenced historians of the 1960s and 1970s dismissed intellectual history as ‘soft’ social history, seeing ideas as ‘the province of a minority of elites, and in any case as subservient to economic factors’.10 Recent decades have seen a resurgence in intellectual history and in the similarly previously maligned social history of the mental and imaginative sphere of society (although social history has been attacked by postmodernists for its reliance on a ‘hard’ approach to social history and a class-based forms of analysis). More recently, both intellectual and social history have flourished. Historians like Peter N. Stearns and Peter Borsay advocate the fusion of methodologies, maintaining that ‘now, more than ever, cultural history needs exposure to the methods, ways of thinking and questions that social history can provide.’11 The intellectual historian is seen by the English literary critic Stefan Collini as someone who finds the reflective and expressive life of the past to be of interest and whose ‘informing aspiration has been to write an ‘intellectual history’, which tries to recover the thought of the past in its complexity and, in a sense which is neither self- contradictory nor trivial, as far as possible in its own terms.’12 Collini’s view matches Fairburn’s argument that a shift is needed in Australian and New Zealand historiography, ‘a shift that places greater importance on the stuff of ideas…in their own historical context.’13 These historians are among those who call for sustained attempts ‘to recover and understand the intellectual life of the past in its knotty, irreducible pastness.’14 Such study values seeking empirical knowledge: to investigate

10 Stefan Collini, “Intellectual History”, Making History, The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain, International History Association, 2010, online at http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/themes/intellectual_history.html (accessed October 3, 2010). 11 Peter N. Stearns, ‘Social History and World History: Prospects for Collaboration’, Journal of World History 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 43; Peter Borsay, ‘New Approaches to Social History. Myth, Memory, and Place: Monmouth and Bath 1750–1900’, Journal of Social History, 39, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 884. Further reflection on continuing widened interdisciplinary approaches comes from Paula Fass, ‘Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue,’ Journal of Social History 37 (2003):39. 12 Collini, Making History. 13 Fairburn, ‘Victorian studies’, 240. 14 Collini, “Intellectual History”.; See also, Donald Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: the History of Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

70 what Fairburn noted ‘the famous idealist philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood discussed as the thought inside the event’.15 This is important to historians of collectors, who argue that putting collectors in the context of the cultural landscape of their period is essential to gaining better understanding of their ‘world’ and to appreciating why they collected.16 If better understanding of Mitchell has been neglected due to the disregard for Victorianism shown by Australian and New Zealand researchers, this may again be the case owing to knowledge about elites (the pan-British governing class from which Mitchell sprang) being likewise left wanting due to a general preference for ‘history from the bottom up’.17 In recent years, more study has gone into labour history than into studying elites because they are generally considered to be an unfashionable topic. It is some thirty years since John Docker’s focus on Australian cultural elites.18 However, if such seeming historical prejudices may have crimped better knowledge of a single actor like Mitchell, recent revision in historiographic approach and recently expanded historiographical methods can now assist in recovering detail about him. Among these are calls for research on the social and cultural history of information, to be read very widely, that Ron Day, W. Boyd Rayward, Jonathan Rose and Robert V. Williams, among others, argue has been neglected.19 Providing context is methodologically necessary to assessing the part played by an actor on history’s stage. In addition, the need to go beyond accepted reading of Mitchell requires delving into his biography to unearth detail that will give a fuller picture of him across his life and to identify events that were significant to him and his mentalité. Philanthropists are frequently studied biographically, as demonstrated by recent biographies on Andrew Carnegie, William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme,

15 Fairburn, ‘Victorian studies’, 236. 16 Shaddy, Books, 16. 17 This description of elites comes from Borsay, ‘New Approaches’, 884. 18 John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974). 19 Ron Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, Power, and History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2008); idem, ‘The Early Diffusion Abroad of the Dewey Decimal Classification: Great Britain, Australia, Europe,’ in Melvil Dewey: The Man and the Classification, ed. Gordon Stevenson and J. Kramer-Greene, 149–173 (Lake Placid, N.Y.: Forest Press, 1983); Jonathan Rose, ‘Alternative Futures for Library History’, Libraries and the Cultural Record 38, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 51, 53; Robert V. Williams, ‘Enhancing the Cultural Record: Recent Trends and Issues in the History of Information Science and Technology’, Libraries and the Cultural Record 44, no. 3 (2009): 326, 336.

71 and William Wilberforce.20 These particular examples are but a few of further biographies executed on these individual philanthropists. Researchers have found that biographical methodology is a useful tool when used to learn about human experiences in their social and cultural contexts because ‘it brings us closer to the reality of other people’s lives.’21 For historian Kathleen D. McCarthy, biographer David Nassau, and student of Chinese entrepreneurs, Hongkong Sociologist Kwok-bun Chan, life history narrative was the best method to examine a complex behavior like philanthropy, particularly within the context of a complex life.22 With Mitchell, the challenge lies in locating detail. His biography is challenging because it appears so simple. His life can be divided into two halves, seemingly differentiated only by a different address in each. In the first half of his life spent living at Millers Point, he can be seen to be developing in the burgeoning entrepôt of colonial Sydney; later, at Darlinghurst, he can be seen developing a library. Viewed this way his life assumes a symmetry, each half dividing into three distinct phases (Appendix 7). This seemingly uncomplicated life belies the complexity underlying his motivation; that the motivation of library philanthropists can be complex is clear from the lives of eleven nineteenth-century library benefactors in Scotland.23 Biographical study of Mitchell also needs to consider the history of his activity as a collector and public benefactor because these activities defined his reputation. Accordingly, this research is a biographic study because as Daniel Defoe’s biographer Paula Backscheider noted the biographer begins with ‘the closest possible

20 Brian Lewis, So Clean, Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Stephen Tomkins, William Wilberforce: a biography (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2007); William Hague, William Wilberforce: the Life of the Great Anti-slave Trade Campaigner (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007); Raymond Lamont-Brown Carnegie: the Richest Man in the World (Gloucestershire : Sutton Publishing, 2006). 21 Eric Homberger & John Charmley, eds. The Troubled Face of Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), ix. 22 McCarthy studied philanthropic strategies of female art patrons in east and mid-western cities where many of America’s major arts organizations first appeared: McCarthy, Women’s Culture, xii, also see chapter 6 on Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924): 151-80; Nasaw, Carnegie, xi; Kwok-bun Chan,‘Father, Son, Wife, Husband: Philanthropy as Exchange and Balance’, Journal of Family Economics, Issue 31 (2010): 387–395. 23 Katrina M. L. Sked and Peter H. Reid. ‘The People Behind the Philanthropy: An Investigation into the Lives and Motivations of Library Philanthropists in Scotland between 1800 and 1914’, Library History 24, Issue 1(March 2008): 48-63.

72 examination of what can be known about the life and career’ of a subject.24 Given the paucity of further evidence about Mitchell against which the repeated anecdotal observations of him can be tested, starting from this premise seemed apt. This research is based on empirical evidence found in primary sources. It is grounded in archival research conducted mainly but not solely at the Mitchell Library. This repository was a reliable context for the sources used because it held material from Mitchell, besides members of Mitchell’s family and others whom Mitchell knew. Primary sources were largely selected and accessed from the Mitchell Library from a sample consisting of (a) Mitchell’s personal library; (b) manuscript material; and, (c) other evidence. Backscheider says ‘the genre biography assumes that what a person does expresses an inner life – personality, motives, aspirations, character.’25 She is referring to ‘geographies of mind’. However, to understand Mitchell’s mentalité we need to know more of him. Apprehensive that there may be insufficient material to explore, as David J. Jones had forewarned, the first test was to ascertain whether sufficient material existed from which Mitchell could be studied.26 Up to now it has been claimed that to draw a comprehensive study of Mitchell has eluded researchers due to the alleged difficulty of inadequate material remaining. This study sought to test this claim, and take soundings from a wide archival sample to see if new depths could be plumbed, and to draw from them. A linear narrative could not do justice to the complex web of intellectual, social, political and economic influences and conditions of Mitchell’s time that coloured his mind. Mitchell’s life centered around acquiring information and building his familiarity with knowledge as it developed in relation to particular interests. This complicates a biographic portrayal, because his life could not be reflected on without considering the literature that preoccupied him. This takes us to book history (sometimes referred to as the histoire du livre), which considers how ideas were transmitted through print.27 Book scholars, book owners and the book market have long recognised ‘the

24 Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62. 25 Backschieder, Reflections, xviii. 26 Jones, ‘Relations’, 25. 27 Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’ in Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 3.

73 book’ as artifact. Clues drawn from individual volumes shed light on their authorship, publication, distribution and ownership – in what cultural historian Robert Darnton has called the ‘communication circuit’ that encompasses the life of printed books (Appendix 7).28 The reader completes this circuit. Clues drawn from individual volumes shed light on the history of books and reading because ‘authors and books exist within historical moments, as juncture of ideas, controversies, and tensions in a society’.29 According to this view, ‘the book’ is recognized as an agent of change and is studied for its material evidence, for what it reveals about its reader and how it is read. Whereas literary study attempts to recover from texts ‘the assumptions and contexts which contributed to the fullness of meaning that such writings possessed for their original publics’, book history focuses on the reader in this process.30 It reads literature as an activity rather than a canon of texts. The material stability of texts is fundamental to developing meaning within Darnton’s communications circuit that involves readers. The ‘book’ assumes ‘objecthood’ and becomes the raw material of history and memory.31 As physical objects, books are themselves pieces of historical evidence and physical traces left in a book by a reader reveal the significance of and engagement with that book ‘object’. Provenance too assists scholarship, showing ownership and exchange. Annotations are valued; they open up the area of personal reading ‘in which the formation and exchange of ideas comprise the primary element’.32 Annotations in books can serve as a guide to how readers read, besides revealing how knowledge and opinions were shared. A reader’s thoughts and exchanges about them can be reassembled from marginalia just as in musicological study the creative history of a musician’s scores can be reconstructed by annotations.33 Annotations can show how books were passed around, as Heather J. Jackson demonstrated from a sample of approximately 2,000 titles from the Romantic period between 1790-1830 when

28 Darnton, ‘History’, 3, 6. 29 Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), ix 30 Collini, Intellectual History. 31 Leslie Howsam, ‘What is the historiography of books? Recent studies in authorship, publishing, and reading in Modern Britain and North America’, The Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008):1090. 32 Robin Myers, Michael Harris & Giles Mandelbrote, Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), ix.; See also, David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (London: British Library & Oak Knoll Press, 1994). 33 Christophe Grabowski and John Rink (Eds), Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

74 ownership of books extended to all classes. Jackson identified that writing in books was for the most part accepted as a privilege of ownership and was considered ‘under the right circumstances, a good thing to do.’34 Hence, through being a customary practice, marginalia allow the historian to reconstruct ‘the mental processes by which readers appropriated texts’.35 Histories of reading and reception studies developed in tandem with book history. Working on the premise that readers ‘make meaning’, Cathy N. Davidson conducted an archaeology of readers from two centuries ago to learn how the earliest novels in America were first read. In considering the book in history from the perspective of its reader, Davidson was concerned with ‘the forces that shape mentalités.’ She focused on what she calls the ‘interpretive grid (lost but still largely recoverable) in and around which [those] readers read’.36 She identified possibilities for meaning in the fiction and from ‘readers inscriptions and marginalia where they left their mark’ as well as from their diaries, letters and related papers.37 For Davidson, there is no substitute for handling the ‘real thing’: the book object owned by the reader under study. As Davidson noted, ‘wear and tear and the repairs of same – torn pages neatly hand sewn back into the volume, dog-eared corners carefully trimmed, thumb papers (little tabs of vellum or wallpaper) secured in the spines of books to protect the print from smudging – constitute further evidence of worth and use’.38 Reader-oriented topics and approaches make up the history of reading. Book history and reception studies are active areas of current research as the publishing pathways series of studies edited by book historians Robin Myers, Michael Harris & Giles Mandelbrote exemplifies.39 As they observed, ‘Reading and the individual response to the text has become a fashionable field, as literary researchers, bibliographers and book historians have increasingly focused their attention on the role of the reader in the cultural and creative process.’40

34 Heather J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 138. 35 Jackson, Romantic Readers, 145. 36 Davidson, Revolution, 4. 37 Davidson, Revolution, 5. 38 Davidson, Revolution, 6; For theoretical background to this see G. Thomas Tanselle, The History of Books as a Field of Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1981), 11-13. 39 Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Books on the Move: Tracking Copies Through Collections and the Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2007). 40 Myers, Harris Mandelbrote, Owners, Annotators, vii.

75 Studies that consider the book as a cultural artefact draw on interdisciplinary approaches. For the purpose of answering what effect books have on cultural change ‘the book can be examined as an art object, technological artifact, commercial product, or cultural signifier.’41 They combine perspectives from approaches ranging from art history, social history and literary theory to study the book as a cultural artifact with the purpose of understanding its role in the history of a given society. Thad Logan stretches this perspective: because the ‘book’ articulated social meaning in the nineteenth century, she scrutinizes the Victorian parlour (a place in which books played a large part) as a material and cultural artefact that she subjects to interdisciplinary analysis. This could be read as a feature of the economic and social conjunture represented in Darnton’s communications circuit, with Logan’s study illustrating the expanded historiographic method that Darnton’s model offers.42 The history of reading, ‘the youngest and least developed of the offspring of the book history movement’,43 is roughly defined as ‘all the diverse ways that books and other forms of printed words are appropriated and used.’44 With literature so central to Mitchell’s life, and given the challenge of his biography in terms of reputedly limited evidence, it appeared appropriate in attempting to recover more of his history to overlap with book history’s regard for the evidential value of books and apply an expanded approach to biographical study of Mitchell by drawing on the methods of the book historian. Consequently, this study is the first to be based on Mitchell’s personal library collection, with this having just been fully identified in 2007.45 Scholars of the book world to historians of collecting have paraphrased Walter Benjamin’s arguments that

41 J. L. W. West, ‘Book history at Penn State’, in The Pennsylvania Center for the Book. http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/histofbook/article.html [accessed 26 May 2010]; Robert Darnton, ‘Histoire du livre, geschichte des buchwesens: an agenda for comparative history’, Publishing History 22 (1987): 33–41. 42 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiii, 233. 43 H. J. Jackson, ‘ ‘Marginal Frivolities’: readers’ notes as evidence for the history of reading, in Myers, Harris, Mandelbrote, Owners, Annotators, 149. 44 James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3. 45 As part of this study came the book: Chanin, Book Life. See chapter 1, p. 3.

76 a man can be read from the books that he reads.46 The journal Biblionews and Australian Notes and Queries ran a series titled ‘By their books ye may (get to) know them’ in a case of, as historian Philipp Blom put it, ‘Show me your library and I’ll tell you who you are’.47 Knowing what Mitchell read and what his choice in books was can signal his interests and preferences. Adopting Benjamin’s view, this study takes Mitchell’s personal library of printed books and manuscripts to be his archive and turns to it to establish what might be discerned from them. Besides the titles which Mitchell assembled himself, his personal library contained the books owned by his grandmother Augusta Maria Scott (1775-1840), his father James Mitchell (bap.1793-1869), and his mother Augusta Maria Mitchell (1798-1871). Her personal books were never listed, however David Mitchell listed the titles he owned in 1877.48 In this he was following his father who drew up a catalogue of the titles he owned in 1839 and again in 1858.49 A number of Augusta Scott’s books have their own entry in the SLNSW catalogue.50 Despite the wealth of material contained in Mitchell’s personal library, no publication has focused on items from it in terms of the arguable but valuable construct of provenance.51 The provenance of these objects could offer a more historically coherent interpretation of them that could be revealing about Mitchell and his history. The exhibition One Hundred (2010), to mark the centenary of the opening of the Mitchell Library and supposedly drawn on Mitchell’s collection, presented individual items without much focus on Mitchell’s history with an item. Many of the items bequeathed by Mitchell are now digitally presented online through atmitchell.com with minimal provenance history, a not uncommon oversight among

46 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1982), 59-60, 63, 66-67. Online at http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/benj- bookcoll.htm [accessed September 12, 2010]. 47 Brian Taylor, ‘By their books ye may (get to) know them (1): Edgar Ederheimer’, Biblionews and Australian Notes and Queries, 2007-2009 online at http://bookcollectors.org.au/2009/08/by-their- books-ye-may-get-to-know-them-1-edgar-ederheimer/ [accessed September 9, 2010]; Philipp Blom, To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 201. 48 David Scott, Mitchell, Catalogues and indexes to books held, Catalogue of Pickering Publications in the Library of David Scott Mitchell, 5 December 1877, ML C371. 49 James Mitchell, ‘List of books’, in David Scott Mitchell Catalogue and indexes to books held c.1839-1877, MLC374. 50 Seventy-four items are listed: http://library.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/X?augusta%20scott [accessed September 12, 2010]. 51 Shelley Sweeney, ‘The Ambiguous Origins of the Archival Principle of “Provenance”’, Libraries & the Cultural Record, Volume 43, Number 2 (2008):193-194, 207.

77 libraries in New South Wales.52 Personal libraries have long been the basis of character appreciation. For example Timothy Ryback isolated titles in Adolf Hitler’s personal library. From 1,244 texts that Hitler read, estimated to be ‘10% at most of Hitler’s original collection’, Ryback contextualised Hitler and considered Hitler’s perspective in terms of the titles that influenced him.53 Thomas Wright constructed a biographical picture of Oscar Wilde illuminated exclusively through 50 books that Wilde once owned and are now found in British and American libraries.54 In these studies, perspective on an individual anchors in their personal library. Studies like these extend library-based study beyond bibliographical cataloguing (for example, such as Ursula Brigish’s listing of the library of South African statesman Jan Smuts) or referencing for historical study.55 They extend a reading of the book beyond its being read textually for, or as, historical evidence.56 In many ways they extend the practice of analytical bibliography that Mitchell himself knew. Library catalogues have long been considered valuable documents as Mitchell used them; they were studied closely for information about publications as demonstrated from catalogues in Mitchell’s personal library and that of his father. Additionally studies anchored in personal libraries read library material culturally and the study of books and libraries has long been part of the study of collections and the history of collecting. Collectors are studied in terms of their possessions, which become metaphors for their talents and aspirations.57 Recent histories of books and reading have turned to the personal relationships that readers held with the volumes they owned. Margaret Willes considers the relationship of avid readers like Samuel Pepys, Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane

52 State Library of New South Wales, atmitchell.com online at http://sl.nsw.gov.au [accessed October 24, 2011]; Stephens, ‘Heritage Book Collections’, 178. 53 Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: the Books that Shaped his Life (London: Vintage, 2010), xix, 230. 54 Thomas Wright, Oscar's Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 306, 315. 55 Ursula Brigish, ed., The Library of Jan Christiaan Smuts: A Catalogue (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, Dept. of Bibliography, Librarianship and Typography, 1972). 56 Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Books: A Study of the Design and Production of Improper Books in the Age of the Hand Press with a Catalogue (London: Farrand Press & Private Libraries Association, 1990). 57 Frances Larson, An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

78 to their personal libraries.58 The principle that private libraries offer insight into the interests and sources of their owners and serve ‘as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector’ underscores the recovery of 400 titles and inventories of lost and extant manuscripts from the private library that belonged to Swiss physician and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516-1565). Urs Leu, Raffael Keller and Sandra Weidmann focused on the contents of Gessner’s library to ‘open the door to Gessner's study’ and gain insight into his patterns of thought and so to the intellectual world of a Renaissance scholar.59 Similar studies have illuminated other histories of intellectual life, like Gina Dahl’s portrayal of intellectual life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Norway drawn from the books owned by Norwegian clerics.60 Likwise the bibliophile and scholar Harry Friedenwald, working from a catalogue to his own library, opened a window into Jewish medical history.61 Both reader and book are enlivened by approaching historical inquiry from the reader’s perspective. Reading is considered to be an engaged activity that, like the book objects that are read, reflects the cultural and historical milieu occupied by the book and its reader. Scholars have anatomized textual engagement in order to appreciate the imagination of periods under study across the ages.62 For Laurel Amtower, who draws on late medieval culture and images from it besides historical documents and literary texts, reading and readers form historical evidence. She cites Chaucer’s depiction of himself as a reader in his own text to note that the crucial skill of careful attention to reading can lead to insights. Reading ‘is metaphorically enlarged beyond the compass of the text so that it becomes an act replete with social

resonance’.63 This study examines Mitchell’s books (and his manuscripts) from both a

58 Margaret Willes, Reading Matters: Five centuries of Discovering Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): 28-53; 59-108; 109-135. 59 Urs B. Leu, Raffael Keller and Sandra Weidmann, Conrad Gessner's Private Library (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 60 Gina Dahl, Book Collections of Clerics in Norway, 1650-1750 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010). 61 Harry Friedenwald, Jewish Luminaries in Medical History (and a Catalogue of Works Bearing on the Subject of the Jews and Medicine from the Private Library of Harry Friedenwald) (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Pub., 2009).; Arturo Castiglioni, ‘Dr Harry Friedenwald, Collector and Historian’, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 33, no. 1 (January 1945): 30-38 online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC200895/ [accessed September 20, 2010]. 62 Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Chapter 1. 63 Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: the Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 157-159.

79 material perspective and from a reader’s perspective. These cultural artefacts give clues that reveal details about his life which are independently confirmed by other archival material including correspondence, visual material, and ephemera. This method requires reading empathetically (imagining being in Mitchell’s shoes); critically (looking beyond why he held a particular item); and analytically (considering the nature of reading and how he could have read).64 By sympathetic, close reading of a wide range of primary and secondary sources it was possible to flesh out knowledge about him further. For example, invoices (as from English booksellers) and shipping bills declared when books were bought and shipped to Sydney.65 To contextualise Mitchell and his collection from his reading without a reading diary from him could arguably be considered a speculative activity. However, while not a comprehensive reading of Mitchell’s personal library, sweeping through it carefully made clear the patterns to titles which it held and these patterns reveal the interests that Mitchell had in his reading. Reading a range of titles within his collection, which included many pamphlets, allowed a measure of his library, his selectivity in terms of what he read, and so identified what absorbed his attention. Heather Jackson observed that, ‘a large number of books belonging to a particular reader can reveal that person’s routines and methods of assimilation…By the patterns observable in a personal collection [it is] possible to recover the mental processes of readers.’66 Robert A. Shaddy’s anatomy of American book-collectors between 1890 and 1930 shows how they were intensely connected to the literature in their collections in the way that anecdotes report that Mitchell’s knowledge regarding the material he held was remarkable.67 This knowledge indicates an involvement with text on Mitchell’s part such as Shaddy encountered. In light of this, it is not far- fetched that much like a painter’s stroke is his signature, so Mitchell’s selection of

64 On the role of imagination in reading archival material and producing history out of archival research see Carolyn Steedman, ‘Intimacy in research: accounting for it’, History of the Human Sciences 21, no. 4, (November 2008): 17-33. 65 Sotheran Booksellers to Mitchell, April 11, 1878, ML MSA1461, 10; Bill of lading, April 30, 1878, ML Ms A1461, 11. 66 Jackson, Romantic Readers, 147. 67 Shaddy, Books, 11. Jose gives example of Mitchell’s attachment to his library as a matter of patriotism: Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 468; and of knowledge related to this: 469.

80 books (which are now identified by the prefix ‘DSM’) is revealing of him.68 It pointed to the emphasis in his collection on social issues and literature to do with reform. Titles on crime, injustice, welfare, and philanthropic practice abound. They reveal deep social engagement and their number made it essential to isolate the nature and origins of his interest in such material. The printed material that Mitchell selected left a ‘paper trail’ of the subjects, issues and personalities that held his attention. Knowing what he read identified his interests and sympathies and led to connections that he maintained. So, there is a correlation between material that he read and his lived life as noted in correspondence from and to him. This supported Walter Benjamin’s arguments that ‘the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories’.69 While researching Mitchell’s collection, it became striking how items he owned related to events which he participated in; these were identified from correspondence, receipts, and other related evidence as noted below. Hence Mitchell’s books could constitute a personal diary that offer insight into him as well as into his intellectual life. Mitchell’s library is treated as a subjective archive. Looking for annotations disappoints because few marginalia in his hand exist. In the main, Mitchell left clean copies without annotations. However, ownership inscriptions showed where a single book had been passed on to other readers, as among members of the circle centred around Sydney solicitor and bibliophile Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse (1806-1873). Other notes elsewhere showed titles that Mitchell lent to readers, who included his cousin Rose Scott (1847-1925), her brother George Scott (1853-1926) and Charles Badham (1813-1884), first president of Sydney’s Free Public Library (1870-1883) (later the Public Library of New South Wales).70 In archival research there is a preconceived hierarchy or reliability that relies on personal records for evidence. Yet relying on evidence from the subject alone has its own danger making alternative sources of information necessary. Insights gained from Mitchell’s personal library could only be relied on

68 In similar fashion that Melbourne collector Alfred Felton’s acquisitions can be read as reflecting his own life: Alison Inglis, ‘Alfred Felton as a Collector of Art’ in Andrew Grimwade and Gerard Vaughan eds. Great Philanthropists on Trial, The Art of the Bequest (Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press in association with the National Gallery of Victoria, 2006), 48-9. 69 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library’, 59-60, 63, 66-67. 70 David Scott Mitchell, Catalogues and indexes to books held, books lent, ML C372; Chanin, Book Life, 177.

81 when they were corroborated by detail found elsewhere. Assorted papers that Mitchell left included correspondence, diaries, notebooks, payments and receipts, and ephemera. These gave further evidence of Mitchell’s lifelong interaction with the books he held. Information was also extracted from other records. Invoices were analysed for information they could yield, such as patterns to Mitchell’s purchases. With each publication that he bought, cross-reference was made to events surrounding its authorship and publication including its reception because such detail could be contextually informative (as in Darnton’s chain). In the absence of many personal reflections left by Mitchell, I cast the net wide for evidence to draw from a broad evidentiary sample, as book historian Wallace Kirsop advises.71 Papers belonging to members from within his extended family of the Mitchell, Scott, Rusden and Merewether clans offered this evidence, some of which yielded Mitchell’s personal voice. Their papers provided corroborative evidence and demonstrated the importance of taking a wide view in research. A wealth of material that reflected on Mitchell supported the limited number of primary letters from him besides unearthing his own voice in material from him. Patience with the drudgery that literary scholar Richard D. Altick referred to in terms of searching for evidence paid off because trawling through culture-bound and time- bound material yielded corroborative evidence besides much insight into contemporary times, issues and personalities.72 It gave the colour of the time. Victorian discretion most likely accounts for the lack of evidence existing from Mitchell. He was no publicity seeker, coming from an age which considered public reticence a mark of good breeding. Of Mitchell, Arthur Jose spoke of ‘the professional in him coming uppermost’; he ‘hated to be made a show of’, yet ‘behind his professional mask, tightly as he might clutch it to him, was the most human of men’.73 Taking a wide view of research was essential to overcome the manners of a different era. Social and personal connections held by his family, such as by his grandparents in England, explain much about the background that Mitchell inherited and the perspective he held. One example is the naming of his uncle

71 Kirsop advises that ‘the net can and should be cast as widely as possible.’ Kirsop, ‘Foreward’, ii. 72 Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York: Free Press, 1950), 104-5, quoted in Backscheider, Reflections on Biography, 89. 73 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 469.

82 Alexander Walker Scott (1800-1803) after Brigadier General Alexander Walker (1764-1831), collector of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts now in the Bodleian Library.74 Familiarity with the histories of individuals who were part of Mitchell’s history sharpens particularities in his history. Contemporaries offered more evidence that further corroborated this detail identified among his books and manuscripts. Their evidence added to the reliability of my sweep. Evidence from contemporaries and ‘testing documents against the witnesses’ clarified what Backscheider called the ‘moral dimension’ of characters, but also gave insight into social networks existing among them and that Mitchell enjoyed.75 A complex tapestry of fresh detail could be woven from information extracted from their connections. Visual evidence can always enrich understanding. Maps clarified the nature and extent of Mitchell’s landholdings. Photographs revealed the milieu of the everyday that Mitchell lived in and witnessed. Works of art showed his aesthetic and stylistic preferences and sensibilities. Ephemera yielded further insights. Varied lines of evidence like these demonstrated that facts were not misrepresented, and that the analysis is not fanciful but reflects accurate recording; they gave the study reliability.76 The sample included unsorted primary sources. The papers of Grace Hendy Pooley (1865-1947) give example of this. Her papers gave insight into Mitchell’s support of inquiry into Australia’s history. These papers were identified from card research and through lists and finding aids that exist in paper form. Searching these can be more comprehensive than relying on online catalogues. The completeness of online catalogues can not be relied on in terms of extracting details about documents and their relevance. Discovery benefits from

74 E. I. Carlyle, ‘Walker, Alexander (1764–1831)’, rev. M. G. M. Jones, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28467, accessed November 6, 2010]; E. Dodwell, E. and J. S. Miles, (Comp. & Ed.), Alphabetical list of the officers of the Indian Army: with the dates of their respective promotion, retirement, resignation, or death, whether in India or in Europe, from the year 1760 to the year 1834 inclusive, corrected to September 30, 1837 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, 1838); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Peoples in transition: of adventurers and administrators in south India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39:2-3 (2002), 219, 221; Hermann Ethé, Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Pushtu manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889-1930); E. Sachau and H. Ethé (Prepared, Part III by A.F.L. Beeston), Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani and Pushtu manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954); Falconer Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Vol. IV (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1897), 674-79. 75 Backscheider, Reflections, 75. 76 J. Mason, Qualitative Researching (London: Sage, 1996), 146.

83 searching beyond these when around 70% of the SLNSW collections (as of mid- 2009) lacked an appropriate electronic record.77 Retrieval would not have been as productive (and Pooley’s papers among others may have remained undiscovered) if digital documents alone were relied on. Digital documentation still requires the analytical and interpretative skills that have always been needed in archival research.78 Documents and their surrounding material need to be seen because meaning begins for the researcher from the first encounter with the material – from opening the container holding it, despite archivist Terry Cook’s caution that historical objectivity is ‘compromised’ by archival intervention from the moment that the material is archived.79 Every facet of primary material is able to convey detail, if only a sense of the period that the material stems from. Examining material around the items that were viewed offers what Backscheider described as ‘a sense of the time, its issues, and how people worked and thought.’80 This is particularly valid in a large repository like the Mitchell Library, where unsorted primary sources remain (like Pooley’s papers) to potentially allow such discovery. Irrespective of Cook’s arguments, archival material offers some contact with minds from the past and develops the ‘imaginative understanding’ that E. H. Carr believed was essential to historical practice.81 It can also open the researcher to the chance of unexpected discovery. In order to interpret all sources productively, it was necessary to be alert to the context in which they were produced when reading them.82 Since the late seventeenth-century the importance of contextual pertinence in determining how to understand the past has been understood.83 Carr maintained the importance of contextual relevance, arguing that making sense of the facts of the past is central to ‘the past’.84 Searching for detail about Mitchell required casting the net wide across chronology and culture. This approach

77 Patton, ‘Audible voice’, 144. 78 Cunningham, Sean, ‘Archive skills and tools for historians’, http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/archive_skills_and_tools_for_historians.htm l (accessed November 6, 2010). 79 Terry Cook, ‘The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape’, The Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 3 (September 2009): 511. 80 Backscheider, Reflections, 67. 81 E. H. Carr, What is History? 2nd ed. , ed. R. W. Davies (London: Penguin, 1964), 24. 82 Author unkown, ‘Notes on the use of private papers for historical research’, Historical Research, 39, 100 (1966): 197–198. 83 Fitzpatrick et. al., Enlightenment World, 3. 84 Carr, History?, 11, 22.

84 was informed by agreement with Christoph Classen & Wulf Kensteiner’s premise that ‘Western historical culture is very complex, unfolds in a transnational cultural context, and teems with intergeneric and intermediatic references’.85 Besides, as historian James Raven observed, ‘books are livres sans frontières, [and that] scripts and print travel the world, cross boundaries and breach controls.’86 Here Raven echoes Darnton’s observation that books cannot be confined to a single discipline when treated as objects of study, that the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method.87 Accordingly, while Mitchell’s life was entirely Sydney-based, understanding of him involved exploring varied individuals beyond, as well as different geographies and many subject histories, that would require a cross-disciplinary and trans-national approach. This research involved the different geographies of Scotland, England, Australia, India and America which each have their own histories. So too do the many subjects that were taken into account, some of which have their own discipline-specific history as in the case of medicine and publishing. Particular histories like these have in turn been influenced by techniques and methods from other disciplines. For example, the historiography of medicine influenced developments in social history; social history, and the later rise in cultural history, in turn influenced approaches to medical history.88 Medical historian Mark Harrison drew on approaches from cultural history and subaltern studies for his study of colonial and post-colonial medicine which included mention of Mitchell’s grandfather, Dr Helenus Scott (1760-1821).89 Historian Miri Rubin defines cross- disciplinary practice as ‘the hallmark of much cultural history.’90 With this in mind, it

85 Christoph Classen, and Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Truth and authenticity in contemporary historical culture: an introduction to historical representation and historical truth’, History and Theory 47 (May 2009): 1-4. 86 James Raven, ‘Book History’, History Today (September 2010): 55. 87 Darnton, ‘History’, 21. 88 Roy Sydney Porter, ‘The historiography of medicine in the United Kingdom’, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, eds., Locating Medical History: the Stories and Their Meanings, eds. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 194–208. 89 Mark Harrison, ‘From medical astrology to medical astronomy: sol-lunar and planetary theories of disease in British medicine, c.1700-1850’, British Journal for the History of Science 33, no. 1(March 2000): 25-48, 37. See also Dharampal, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts (Delhi: Impex India, 1971), 264-274. 90 Miri Rubin, ‘Cultural history I: what's in a name?’, in Making History, The changing Face of the profession in Britain (London: International History Association, 2008) online at http://www.history.ac.uk/making historyresources/articles/cultural_history.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

85 was essential to consider the different mind-sets and approaches applicable to each historical sub-discipline (political, economic, educational, medical etc.) in terms of how each may be relevant to research into Mitchell and to developing understanding of him. Working this way was somewhat more like working as an ‘eight-eyed traveller’ (to paraphrase the literary critic Leon Edel’s description of the biographer working as a ‘four-eyed traveller’) and judging views from Mitchell’s perspective besides those of other observers, and the future reader let alone historical assessment.91 Kept in mind throughout this study was Paul Kristeller’s relativism or historicism about the temporal ‘dated’ element to every past thought ‘which is due to the personality of the thinker, to the time in which he lived, and to the influences to which he was exposed’ and which must be retained if truth is to be gained.92 Making sense of a complex human behaviour as altruism necessarily requires drawing on a combination of sources. Studies of benefactors (as those of sixteenth century patron of natural knowledge, Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), to give one example) reflect how study of them has widened in the scope of its research and focus, from reliance on papers of the subject under study to situating that individual in the context of contemporary intellectual life.93 Topics to consider included the historical study of collections, of museums and the development of cultural institutions; of book culture, literature, and reading theory; of family history, genealogy and biographical study; of social, intellectual, cultural and economic history; besides the history of voluntarism, charity and philanthropy. Detail found in all sources had to be verified. Wider focus fits too within a changing emphasis that is currently growing among Australian historians to re-conceptualize Australia in a world context. Wider reading of what constitutes ‘Australian’ study was expressed at the 2008 Australian Historical Association Conference where Desley Deacon spoke of the different mental maps of Australia that people held. As Deacon said, many

91 Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica. (1959; New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 236. quoted in Backscheider, Reflections on Biography, 73. 92 Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘History of Philosophy and History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 2, no. 1 (April 1964), 11. 93 Francis Ames-Lewis, ed., Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College, Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Aldershot, Hamps.; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999); Perry E. Gresham with Carol Jose, The Sign of the Golden Grasshopper, A Biography of Sir Thomas Gresham (Ottawa, Ill.: Jameson Books, 1995); The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham: comp. chiefly from his correspondence preserved in Her Majesty's state-paper office: including notices of many of his contemporaries (London: R. Jennings, 1839).

86 ‘geographies of the mind’ exist. One ‘mind map’, that had only a tenuous relationship with actual geographical places, was ‘the map of family.’94 Engaging with several disciplines (that included local and family history besides medical history and publishing history, to name a few examples) was both essential and fruitful to recovery of Mitchell. Widening perspective entailed knowing and appreciating collective biographies, beyond family members and their networks.95 Details were compiled of numerous individuals in aggregate and their connections to one another, as from Mitchell’s cohort at the University of Sydney. This contributed to gaining a view of employment opportunities open to them and which Mitchell could have considered. Similarly considering nineteenth-century philanthropists contributed to evaluating Mitchell’s generosity (Appendix 11). In the case of some individuals, primary sources were the only traceable reference that could be found. Some of the figures encountered are generally unfamiliar. James Samuel Bray (1840-1918), about whom little has been written, is one such example.96 In other cases, individuals (like William Astley (1855-1911) to give one example) have been written about briefly.97 Others, like Nicol Stenhouse, to give an example, did not appear to have been discussed for some time.98 While the Australian literature database Austlit identifies details of the literature existing on nineteenth century literary individuals in Australia, it was necessary to research their biographies because as Sweet reminds

One of the problems of working with Victorian culture is that so much of it survives: a jungle composed of records, documents, handbills, books, pamphlets, newspapers, diaries and wax cylinders awaits the researcher. And, to follow that analogy, those working in the field have

94 Desley Deacon, ‘Location! Location! Location! Mind Maps and Theatrical Circuits in Australian Transnational History’, Presidential Address, Australian Historical Association Conference 2008, online at http://www.theaha.org.au/reports/deacon.htm (accessed September 12, 2010). 95 Alison Booth, ‘Focus on the Oxford DNB: fighting for lives in the ODNB, or taking prosopography seriously’, Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 267–79. 96 G. J. McCarthy, ‘James Samuel Bray (1840-1918)’, (2004) Encyclopedia of Australian Science online at ttp://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000254b.htm (accessed September 12, 2010); Chanin, Book Life, 183-188. 97 Barry G. Andrews, Price Warung/William Astley (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976); Bruce Bennett, ‘The Short Story, 1890s to 1950’ in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 156-179; 1990), 99-104. 98 Beyond Jordaens (1979) see, Austlit, The Australian Literature Resource, www.austlit.edu.au, 2002 (accessed September 12, 2010).

87 tended to stick to the paths cut by those who have already passed the same way.99

Seeking to traverse beyond previously explored paths, those were borne in mind when searching for the mass of material that Sweet described as existing ‘in archives, libraries, private collections, waiting to be dragged back into public cognizance.’ While the bulk of primary sources for this study were located within the Mitchell Library, sources identified elsewhere were also plumbed. Sources examined beyond Australia (namely at the British Library, in Cambridge and in Scotland) allowed looking beyond the local as well as to flesh it out within the wider context. Research on the spot, ‘walking the history’, can sometimes allow observations that could otherwise not be possible (as occurred in the places in Fife, Scotland that Mitchell’s forebears knew; and in Newcastle, N.S.W.).100 Throughout, Backscheider’s opinion that biography requires the selective presentation of evidence was kept in mind.101 She draws on Eric Homberger and John Charmley, who view biography as being as challenging as making art.102 To convey the feel of an individual’s experience, says Backscheider, by the act of ‘first, projection and then interpretation and communication is always a risky kind of truth- telling.’103 This is because the biographer combines, assimilates, extracts and abstracts evidence. As Backscheider says, the biographer draws inferences and builds chains; or distils evidence, as historian Barbara Tuchman puts it.104 However – unlike the artist – the biographer can not create but is bound by the evidence. The historian must ‘stay within the evidence’, as Tuchman maintains.105 Lack of evidence does not necessarily mean that something did not occur; scientists know that no evidence is evidence. Historians have to watch for problems arising from hidden evidence, as encountered by historians of the poor and of elites

99 AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, www.austlit.edu.au, 2002 (accessed September 12, 2010); Sweet, Inventing, 230. 100 On the value of ‘walking’ history see Mary Eagle, ‘Keynote Address, ARLIS/ANZ Conference’, ARLIS/ANZ Journal no. 58 (2004): 31-3. 101 Backscheider, Reflections, xix. 102 Eric Homberger & John Charmley eds. The Troubled Face of Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), xi. 103 Backscheider, Reflections, xix. 104 Backscheider, Reflections, 86.; Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History, Selected Essays (London: Macmillan 1981/1984), 17. 105 Tuchman, Practicing, 18.

88 alike. Historians of social welfare find the history of the poor notoriously elusive because ‘the evidence is patchy, and usually only found in the records of those who policed the poor’.106 Likewise, much evidence is often concealed at the opposite end of the social spectrum, as is the case in Mitchell’s history. Maybanke Anderson (1845-1927) was the sister of Norman Selfe (1839-1911), one of Mitchell’s circle of friends; she worked with Rose Scott. In discussing Anderson, her biographer Jan Roberts noted that the links of friendship between individuals in Anderson’s circle and their families can not be overestimated.107 She describes the closeness that existed among family and social circles and which escaped the public eye: ‘They met and wrote to each other regularly, exchanged confidences and were constantly and openly searching for new ways of acting and thinking. They were unafraid of the past and unafraid of the future – it was the present that often appalled them.’ Such interaction is clear from Selfe’s engagement with Mitchell that was detectable only from a few items in Mitchell’s library.108 However, locating material beyond Mitchell’s personal records, and turning to materials kept by family members and close friends deepened and thickened Mitchell’s chronology. From their evidence were developed circles of contact that Mitchell had with friends, acquaintances and competitors through his life (like Selfe). From their papers were unearthed fleeting glimpses here and there of time spent with Mitchell, thereby opening up his activity. Key personalities at key moments in his life became clearer. This developed what cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’, and to appreciating that ‘every incident and action has multiple contexts’.109 To claim insufficient evidence from Mitchell ignores what remains; it

106 Stephen Garton, ‘Rights and Duties, Arguing charity and welfare 1880-1920’, in Michael Wearing & Rosemary Berreen eds. Welfare and Social Policy in Australia: the Distribution of Advantage, (Sydney: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 36. 107 Jan Roberts, Maybanke Anderson, Sex Suffrage and Social Reform, 2nd Ed (Avalon, N.S.W.: Ruskin Rowe Press, 1997), 101. 108 Norman Selfe, Sydney: Past, Present and Possible (Sydney: D. S. Ford, Printer, 1906); idem, President’s annual address: delivered on Monday, April 9th, 1888 (Sydney: Printed by Batson & Co., 1888) (DSM/042/P554); New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Remodelling of the “The rocks” resumed area (N.S.W.: Government Printer, 1901) (DSM/Q981.1/20A1). 109 Backscheider, Reflections, 69; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books: 1973/2000), 6-10. On ethnographic methodology beyond reliance on primary verbalizations see, Stefan Hirschauer, ‘Putting things into words, Ethnographic Description and the Silence of the Social’, Human Studies 29, no. 4 (December, 2006): 413-441.

89 also ignores Mitchell’s own view that historical record came from many sources ranging from visual sources (like photographs, drawings, dress designs) to much more that even included popular song. His belief in historical evidence was wide: it ranged from respect for the historicizing of British playwright and antiquary James Robinson Planché (1794-1880) to valuing impressions of the Australian gold-fields from the colonial songman Charles Thatcher (1831-1878). He believed that evidence came from other than eyewitness sources. Accordingly, this meant thinking ‘horizontally and vertically from each piece of evidence’ (in the modus operandi described by Backscheider).110 Working vertically led to consider everything backwards and forwards in time; working horizontally meant examining every item that was related to evidence, which is how Samuel Bray’s association with Mitchell was detected, as was the influence of John Couch Grylls (1793-1854) and the depth of the link that his friend Emily Heron (1845-1890) had to England’s Langham Place Group. Working from contemporaries is beneficial because their evidence is culturally bound and time bound so they reflect the milieu which Mitchell occupied. Such contextual evidence gives understanding to circumstances and brings Mitchell’s life into sharper focus. Reading an event or personality from many angles of view coming from different observers also guarded against bias in a primary source. All sources were questioned in terms of what lay beyond what was expressed or what remained, and by asking ‘whose interests are served and in what ways by policies, practices, customs or discourses’?111 Endeavour was made to read ‘against the grain of the sources for the presences, absences and hidden voices’. This also required being watchful for footprints left on the archival record by archivists intervening in what Terry Cook describes as the ‘social historiography’ of an archive (and the great silence between archivists and historians).112 Some of the papers from Mitchell’s extended family and those of his contemporaries appear to be generally unfamiliar judging from publications so far. Judith A. Allen, the biographer of Mitchell’s cousin Rose Scott, drew on the Scott family papers, but she drew her biography largely from the perspective of Scott’s

110 Backscheider, Reflections, 69. 111 P. T. Knight, Small-Scale Research: Pragmatic Inquiry in Social Science and the Caring Professions. (London: Sage, 2002), 12. 112 Garton, ‘Rights’, 36; Cook, “The Archive(s)”, 512, 516-517.

90 feminism.113 Fellow student William Windeyer (1834-1897) and family friend Nicol Stenhouse have been studied, but again these studies were approached from particular perspectives that did not embrace some of the material read through for this study.114 Circumstances came alive and character and networks were revealed from this unpublished material, like correspondence from James Mitchell and his brother-in- law Robert Scott (1799-1844). Other evidence was found by considering papers that Mitchell owned. Ryback drew on corroborating evidence to develop his glimpse of Hitler as preserved among his books and Wright worked from Wildes’s allusions in his letters and writings to gain an impression of the physical appearance of Wilde’s library.115 Working from James Bray’s papers that Mitchell once owned led to discovering instances explaining how and what Mitchell bought. Bray’s own history and his connections were uncovered from Bray’s notes and sketches that Mitchell acquired from him. Knowing Bray better uncovered Mitchell’s connections through Bray to the wider context of contemporary libraries and museums and their culture, and to urban developments that were allied to increasing leisure time. Working beyond Mitchell’s own records and consulting data from records that library authorities and library records offer (such as annual reports and catalogues) added perspective to these readings. The seam that was worked on was unexplored from Mitchell’s perspective. Earlier scholars worked at the Mitchell Library on items from Mitchell’s collection and drew on his material for their particular studies. Few (that were evident) looked at Mitchell or his history beyond (judging from recent publications) Paul Brunton and Elizabeth Ellis and Brian Fletcher.116 Literature, history and biography became interdependent as clues were gained to Mitchell’s life ‘read’ from his books; these clues were corroborated by other evidence like correspondence, drawings and photographs, annual charity reports and parliamentary inquiries, catalogues and book lists, receipts and ephemera. Corroborative material (located in unpublished records) revealed the influences at

113 Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott, Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). 114 Leonora Ritter, “William and Mary Windeyer in Colonial New South Wales: Simultaneous Bearers of Two Traditions” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 1995); Jordens, The Stenhouse Circle; Manning family pictorial material c.1857-1900, ML PXA1223. 115 Ryback, Hitler’s, xix; Wright, Oscar’s Book’s, 316. 116 Brunton and Ellis, Grand Obsession; Fletcher, Obsession.

91 play that shaped Mitchell’s social outlook and generosity. It illustrates his deeply-held interest in benefaction, allows revision of his social engagement, and evaluation of his gift in terms of the philanthropic practices and generosity of his day.

92 Chapter Four Cultural Inheritance: Inherited Understandings of Assistance

On Saturday March 19, 1836, the Sydney Gazette advertised the first publication of ‘Australian tracts, for the dissemination of moral, domestic, and patriotic feelings’.1 These were promoted as the first endeavour in Australia to bring useful knowledge within popular reach. The infant David Scott Mitchell was born that day in the upper-floor quarters for the medical officers of Sydney’s military and general hospital in Macquarie Street. Interest in the concepts of accessible knowledge would permeate his life. Mitchell was born, and lived, between eras. In the year that he was born Frederick Marryat’s novel Mr Midshipman Easy and Charles Dickens’ first novel The Pickwick Papers appeared. Just born as a subject of William IV, Britain’s last Hanoverian monarch, who died in June 1837, Mitchell thereafter lived through the long reign of Queen Victoria, who was crowned in June 1838. The Georgian age had been autocratic and speculative; the Victorian era was populist and utilitarian. His grandfather corresponded with Sir Joseph Banks, who was closely linked with Britain’s discovery of the Australian continent. Mitchell would live through Australian Federation. When he was born, military rule which administered the colony was waning, and colonial civil order was rapidly replacing convict administration. Colonists seriously contemplating the change wrought in the colony since its formation were justifiably proud of the energies displayed by their enterprising community.2 Within four decades a flourishing centre grew from what originated as a gaol without walls. Anniversary dinners held to celebrate the first landing of 26 January 1788, encouraged comparison of ‘what we were with what we are.’ Native-born colonists prided themselves on the legacy of ‘good being produced from evil, and the native wilderness converted into an Eden.’3 Later in his life, when Mitchell reflected on this progress, images from his past experience and those inherited from his ancestors, particularly their role in this transformation, figured largely in his thoughts. Known to his friends as David, he also

1 Sydney Gazette, 19 March 1836, 4. 2 Peter Cunningham. Two Years in New South Wales: A Series of Letters comprising Sketches of the Actual State of Society in that Colony, of its peculiar advantages to emigrants, of its topography, natural history &c (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 2: 73. 3 Cunningham, Two Years, 2: 69.

93 bore the names of Scott (from his maternal Anglo-Scottish side), and of Mitchell (from his paternal Scottish side). Features from both lines made up his character and shaped his viewpoint, none more so than his philanthropic outlook and direction. The mosaic of influences that he inherited commingled with models for giving that he observed through his life. Inherited background and personal experience impressed and influenced Mitchell’s understanding of assistance. This chapter looks at the influences in his earlier years that coloured his philanthropic outlook. It gives background to his later personal experience of philanthropy that the ensuing chapters consider.

4.1. Inherited background: Family philanthropic tradition

On his mother’s side, Mitchell inherited a family history extending over three centuries in England, and with an earlier and longer descent in Saxony.4 Tradition had Christopher Frederick (d.1623), founder of the Frederick Family in England, arriving from Hainault during the reign of Elizabeth 1. It is claimed that he was a grandson by a morganatic marriage of Frederick lll, Elector of Saxony, surnamed the Wise (1463- 1525). If an early family exemplar, Frederick the Wise, founder of the University of Wittenberg (1502), was notably interested in cultural life and peaceful government. A reformist, he was an early defender of Martin Luther (1483-1546), and a leading patron of the visual arts in the early decades of the sixteenth century.5 Christopher Frederick enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth 1 from 1595 and became twice Serjeant-Surgeon to James 1. His descendants acquired wealth and position by their mercantile activity particularly with the East India Company. His fourth son, Sir John Frederick (1601-1685) a merchant in Spanish trade, established the wealth of the Frederick family. One of the Merchant Princes of the City and an alderman when knighted in 1660, he became Sheriff, then Lord Mayor of London

4 This lineage was outlined by the notable musical scholar, Edmund Horace Fellowes (1870-1951), well known for his work in the revival of sixteenth and seventeenth century English music, and married into the family: E. H. Fellowes. The Family of Frederick (London: Luff, 1932), 79. Appendix B. 5 For details of Frederick lll’s art patronage see Ingetraut Ludolphy, ‘Die religiose einstellung Friedrichs des weisen, Kurfurst von Sachsen, vor der reformation als voraussetzung seiner lutherschutspolitik’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fur die Geschichte de Protestantismus in Osterrich 96, nos.1-3 (1980): 74-89; Paul M. Bacon, ‘Art patronage and piety in Electoral Saxony: Frederick the Wise promotes the veneration of his Patron, St. Bartholomew’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 39 (Winter 2008): 973-1001; Stanley E Weed, ‘Frederick the Wise Venerating the Virgin and Saints: A Newly Reconstructed Triptych by Lucas Cranach the Elder’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 74, no. 4 (2005): 209-23.

94 (1661-2).6 His career established the interest that subsequent family members would take in civic responsibility. Member of Parliament for Dartmouth and the City of London, he served as Commissioner for trade (1656–1657) and on the Committee of the East India Company (1657-1658, 1660-1661). He reinstated London’s summer fair, Bartholomew Fair, earlier banned by the crown for fear of crowd uprising. Doing this, he signaled that moderate and responsible opposition to the Crown, as found in the City, remained in Restoration London. It also marked his family’s ties with Southwark, a stronghold of non-conformity and a centre of dissent.7 If empathy with free-thinking and reformism was a pattern in family tradition so far, collecting and benevolence were next added to this. The Frederick Baronetcy of Westminster was created in 1723 for his grandson, also Sir John Frederick (1678- 1755), whose nephew was Mitchell’s great-great-grandather. Sir Charles Frederick (1709-1785), Madras-born and Oxford-educated, was a notable antiquarian and collector who presided over the Society of Antiquaries (1735-1737, 1741-2), where he was a model of benevolence.8 In gaining distinction as a patron of the arts and a collector, he followed the example set by his uncle, Sir John Frederick, who was renowned for the unusual botanical specimens that he collected and planted in the Frederick family estate, Burwood Park at Hersham in Surrey. Gunpowder (the ‘devil’s distillate’, as it was known) underpinned aesthetic sensibilities among family members. In his New Organum, Francis Bacon signalled printing and gunpowder as inventions that distinguished European civilization; both combined in family focus. Sir Charles Frederick became Comptroller of the Ordnance (1751-1782), after staging with fireworks the ill-fated commemoration of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle at London’s Green Park in April 1749.9 Three years before, he married Lucy Boscawen (1719-1784), sister of the naval hero Admiral Edward Boscawen (1711-1761), whose wife was the notable bluestocking Frances Glanville

6 W. A. Shaw, The Knights of England: a complete record from the earliest time to the present day of the knights of all the orders of chivalry in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of knights bachelors; incorporating a complete list of knights bachelors dubbed in Ireland (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906), 2:229. 7 Personal communication with Bridget Howlett, Senior Archivist, City of London Corporation, Guildhall, November 3, 2009, Ref.2009/02554: Lord Mayors of the City of London Database. 8 Frederick was the Society’s fourth director. E. W. Brabrook, ‘On the Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London who have held the office of Director’, Archaeologica 62, (1910): 63. 9 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 25-28; Aspinall-Oglander, Admiral’s Wife, 116, 123.

95 Boscawen (1719-1805).10

With a confidence that was anchored in naval and mercantile achievement, bluestocking circles extended their interest in public affairs into investigating new models for civil society. They were sympathetic to democratic sentiment as expressed by John Wilkes (1725–1797) and the demagogue Thomas Paine (1736-1809). They initiated philanthropic ventures like the small school of industry that the novelist and historian Sarah Scott set up in Bath to teach literacy, numeracy, and needlework to a dozen indigent girls. They engaged in utopian speculations, as in Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762).11 Care and reformist agendas held their attention as Scott’s sister Elizabeth Montagu, the leading Bluestocking hostess from 1750, wrote when describing her friend Frances Boscawen.12 Awareness of this passed on to Boscawen’s grand-niece, Mitchell’s future grandmother, Augusta Maria Frederick (1775-1840). As a child, she contemplated Robert Adam’s embellishments of her grand-aunt’s home that Montagu described.13 Augusta’s books, that she passed on to Mitchell, were written by those from bluestocking circles.14 Among Augusta’s papers is a cartoon by satirical artist Charles Jameson Grant

10 Frances Boscawen, was a great-niece, on her mother's side, of the diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706). Evelyn family wealth was largely based on gunpowder production. Scottish neoclassical architect Robert Adam (1728-1792) undertook much lucrative work for the Board of Ordnance. He was commissioned by Admiral Boscawen to design an interior decorated in appropriately nautical style for the Boscawen home, Hatchlands, in East Clandon (near Guildford, in Surrey). Boscawen’s commission (1758-60) became the first recorded work by Adam on a country house. 11 Sarah Scott, A description of Millenium Hall, and the country adjacent together with the characters of the inhabitants, and such historical anecdotes and reflections, as may excite in the reader proper sentiments of humanity, and lead the mind to the love of virtue by a Gentleman on his travels (London: printed for J. Newbery, 1762). 12 Betty Rizzo, ‘Two Versions of Community: Montagu and Scott’, HLQ 65, no. 1-2, (2002): 196; Anna Miegon, ‘Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women’, HLQ 65, no. 1-2 (2002): 26; Also Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); For the reformist ‘agenda’ of Bluestocking women see Gary Kelly,‘Clara Reeve, Provincial Bluestocking: From the Old Whigs to the Modern Liberal State’, HLQ 65, no. 1-2, (2002): 125. For more on Montagu and Scott see Bannet, ‘The Bluestocking Sisters’, 25-55. 13 Aspinall-Oglander, Admiral’s Wife, 248. 14 They include Gibraltar-born politician and poet Sir James Bland Burges (later Baron Lamb) (1752– 1824), Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office (1789-1795), and writer Frances (Fanny) Burney (later D'Arblay) (1752–1840). Sir James Bland Burges, The Birth and triumph of love: a poem (London: Printed for the Proprietor by T. Bensley, sold by R. Jennings and P.W. Tomkins, 1823) (DSM/821.79/L); Fanny Burney, Cecilia, or, Memoirs of an heiress (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820) (DSM.823.66/B); Frances Burney, Evelina, or, The history of a young lady's introduction to the world (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820) (SM/823.66/B/SET).

96 (fl. 1830–1852).15 Grant was key in cultural production of the 1830s, although today he is obscure to most. Little-studied, Grant is described by Print Culture historian Brian Maidment as ‘the uncompromising, unincorporated ‘rebel’ against an increasingly stifling bourgeois hegemony’.16 Generally associated with radical or oppositional politics, Grant attacks the ‘benevolent’ discourses and mechanisms of cultural power in a world ‘deformed by greed, stupidity and vanity’. For Maidment, Grant’s jaundiced analysis of the ‘failures of Whig optimism about rational social progress’ would have been uncomfortable to contemplate in the 1830s. Maidment points to the underlying sophistication of Grant’s political iconography that ‘must have offended many’. Grant outspokenly opposed ‘“the old corruption” visible in such of its representatives as army officers, the clergy, lawyers, and, of course, politicians.’ That Grant’s lithograph survived among Augusta Frederick’s papers signals that she maintained the progressive sentiments she overheard when younger at Hatchlands. Augusta, with her bluestocking legacy, offers evidence that not only a literary pedigree but also a progressive view of social responsibility would strand through her future grandson’s DNA. Cosmopolitan Augusta married Dundee-born East India Company military surgeon Helenus Scott, the Elder (1760-1821). Surgeons were not held in high regard before the discovery of anaesthesia so her choice reflects on Scott’s character as well as his position as an enterprising Anglo-Scot.17 A son of the Manse, Scott was an able scientist who presided over the Bombay Medical Board, introduced into Indian medical practice the vaccination technique of his friend the philanthropic hero Edward Jenner (1749-1823), and was famed world-wide for medicinal baths, details of which were published in 1816.18 In one letter praising Scott’s expertise, the military surgeon

15 Charles Jameson Grant, ‘Slaps on the Face No. 2: The old Ass changing masters, a State secret, ‘Whigs, Tories, Whigs, Tories, Whigs, Tories … without interposition Tantarara rara Rogues all’, 1835, ML PXA2041 in Augusta Maria Scott Scrap Album of Prints and Drawings c.1815-1855. 16 Brian E. Maidment, ‘Student Grant: Caricature and Politics in the 1830s’, Journal of Victorian Culture 3, no.2 (1998): 345-346; idem, ‘Subversive Supplements: Satirical Title Pages of the Periodical Press in the 1830s’, Victorian Periodicals Review 43, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 133-148. 17 On the inferior social and professional position of surgeons see Guenter B. Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 294. Roy Porter documents how for much of the nineteenth century medical innovation was often distrusted for quackery: Roy Porter, Quacks: fakers and charlatans in English medicine (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2000), 16. Well into the nineteenth-century, Medicine was not looked on as the profession of a gentleman: F. B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830-1910 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 346, 358, 376. 18 He served the Bombay Medical Service from January 1783 to March 1810. Dr Helenus Scott, NitroMuriatic Acid Bath (London: W. Bulmer & Co (Printer), c.1817), Scott Family Papers, Vol.7, Dr.

97 responsible for British troops in Quebec values Scott with his progressive science as a pillar of the Empire.19 Scott’s correspondence during the 1790s – as with Sir Joseph Banks – shows his global outlook. During thirty years in India he searched across Indian methods and customs seeking utility from them. In this, and with possessing an ‘enlarged’ view of the world, he was effectively an encyclopédiste. A man of ‘educated sociability’ who read the philosophes, Scott contributed to knowledge comprehensively (like Diderot and d’Alembert whom Scott read). Like the Encyclopedists, Scott believed in the public use of reason and to this end his practical observations record everything, from preparing lime to the ancient caves of Elephanta.20 Clearly entrepreneurial, he ran an experimental farm in Bombay from 1792 at Salsette on territory only occupied by the British from 1774. On return to England, he reputedly ran a successful physician’s practice in Russell Square and the spa town of Bath. Representative of his era of empirical observation, experimentation, analysis and discovery, Scott was among those who explored well-being, as did his friend English chemist and democrat Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808).21 Scott, and the circle he

Helenus Scott, Medical and Scientific Papers 1780-1820, 191, ML MSS 38/2X.; On Scott’s presiding over Bombay Medical Board: P. J. & R. V. Wallis, Eighteenth Century Medics: (subscriptions, licences, apprenticeships) 2nd ed. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Project for Historical Bibliography, 1988), 529. Also, D. G. Crawford, Roll of the Indian Medical Service 1615-1930 (London: W. Thacker, 1930), 410. 19 William Stewart to Helenus Scott, July 20, 1818, Papers of Dr Helenus Scott, Letters Received (1789-1821), Vol. 2, 171, ML MSS38/2X. The treatment Scott developed involved bathing patients in nitro-muriatic acid, and his medicinal use of it led to its being widely used to treat enteric fever. 20 Helenus Scott to Joseph Banks, January 7, 1790, BLMS 3379.1. H. Scott, ‘Some remarks on the Arts of India with miscellaneous observations on various subjects’, Journal of Science and Arts (London: 1816), Scott Family (Rose Scott) Papers (1777-1925), ML MSS382X-6X, Vol. 2, 113. Scott refers to Abbé Raynal’s (1711-1796) work on India (1770), a third of which Denis Diderot (1713- 1784) is credited with writing. The eighteenth century’s ideology of encyclopedism sought knowledge of practical utility to human education, culture and wellbeing. Scott’s observations span Indian procedures in the production of iron, as well as in the manufacture of mortar, ice and paper, and in agriculture and sundry other activities. In India he clearly enjoyed the inter-cultural exchange that William Dalrymple has chronicled (without the inter-marriage: Augusta Scott being one of the very few British women in India). William Dalrymple, ‘Assimilation and Transculturation in Eighteenth- Century India, A Response to Pankaj Mishra’, Common Knowledge 11.3 (2005) 445-485. See also, David Pingree, ‘Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts by Dharampal’ (Review), The Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (November 1972): 178-179. 21 To support his proposals for the use of oxygen gas in the treatment of syphilis, Beddoes used Scott’s reports from Bombay. Correspondence shows Scott’s experimental research. In 1797 Scott lectured publicly for Beddoes’ Medical Pneumatic Institution and Hospital, Bristol. Dorothy A. Standfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D. 1760-1808 Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1984), 177. 188. Humphry Davy assisted Beddoes before Count Rumford engaged him for the Royal Institution. Beddoes then opened a Dispensary and Clinic for outpatients. This was advanced in terms of preventative medicine and community health.

98 belonged to, reflects the cosmopolitanism found among successful Anglo-Scots who capitalised on union with Britain (1707) and whose success was driven by the duality that marked their sense of being – at one with Britain while distinct as Scots.22 Being generally better educated and possessing a higher than average literacy than other Britons, the Scots were marked by a questioning individualism and their sense of being apart – as well as within – the commonness of the one newly ‘nationalized’ community and market economy.23 This would leave Mitchell with another strand to inherit: a sense of community, of common ‘imperial’ identity (no matter what the difference) held together by webs of cosmopolitan sociability.24 With India allegedly having taken a toll on his health, Scott left London for Australia on Sir Joseph Banks’ encouragement. With his eldest son, Robert (1799- 1844), and his third son, Helenus Scott, the Younger (1802-1879), Scott embarked for Sydney in 1821. At the age of 63, Scott became one of many Britons who would look to Australia as a place that offered them improvement, a land of opportunity. Evidence suggests they left England out of disaffection that squares with Grant’s political cartoon. Further proof of this comes from Scott’s youngest son, Patrick (1809-1887), when he dedicated one of his books to the writer James Augustus St John (1801- 1875).25 St John edited the radical newspaper The Republican for the paper’s editor, Richard Carlile (1790-1843), when Carlile (who published Thomas Paine) was imprisoned in 1819 for his eyewitness account of the Peterloo massacre in which soldiers on horseback killed unarmed protestors at a reform meeting in St Peter’s Field in Manchester. The times in England, as Richard Carlile put it, tried men’s souls. In a letter addressed to the Prince Regent, St John presents a desolate picture of England in 1820,

22 Among Scott’s friends were Charles Cornwallis, first marquis and second Earl Cornwallis (1738- 1805), Governor General of India and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; Charles Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch (1772-1819) whose father Henry Scott (1746-1812) was Scotland’s greatest landowner, a student and life-friend of the celebrated political economist Adam Smith, and president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1783 to 1812; and Lady Elizabeth Hardwicke (1763-1858), wife of Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke (1757-1834), also a keen patron of the arts. 23 Since 1707 Britain enjoyed the largest European Free Trade Area with an established system of financial credits, active coastal traffic and profitable trade. 24 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Profiles in transition: Of adventurers and administrators in south India, 1750-1810’, Indian Economic Social History Review 39(2002): 197, 219-220. 25 Patrick Scott, Lelio, A Vision of Reality; Hervor and Other Poems (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851) (DSM/821.89/S). On St. John: Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethoughts in Nineteenth- Century Britain (London; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 43; Robert Hole, Pulpits, politics and public order in England 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 206.

99 …that is calculated to awaken feelings of apprehension and alarm in the most cool, and in the most ambitious bosoms. All around us we behold nothing but pale and meagre countenances agitated by discontent and distress. Every heart palpitates with anxiety; and every eye looks forward with fearful distrust to the opening of that parliament, whose decisions may fix, or destroy for ever, the liberties of the English people.26 St. John’s letter was written in response to growing mass support for democratic reform, from men like himself (a self-made Welsh shoemaker’s son from a charity school), and particularly from middle class ‘reformers’ (like the Scotts), aiming to widen the franchise in order to represent their commercial and industrial interests in towns lacking parliamentary representation. Grant’s cartoon belongs to the highly urban world of the pre-Victorian Era which demanded reform. Restive conditions in Britain, as seen by Grant and St. John, were dispiriting to progressive spirits like the Scotts as echoed in Robert Scott’s belief that circumstances in Britain seemed insuperable.27 Banks himself had faith in the future of the relatively new colony of New South Wales: ‘Who knows but England may revive in New South Wales when it has sunk in Europe.’28 Moreover, the elder Helenus Scott’s closest friend Brigadier General (later Sir) Alexander Walker (1764-1831) had focused attention on the Pacific when he followed Cook’s voyage along Queen Charlotte Sound in an abortive effort at establishing for Britain a military and trading post in the Nootka Sound in the

26 R. Carlile (Ed.), The Republican (London: R. Carlile, Printer, 1819), 209. Unrest in Manchester was met with the ‘Six Acts’ laws limiting freedom of the press and assembly. The parliament that St John refers to is the trial of Queen Caroline who was taken up as a figurehead of the reform movement in antipathy to the then widely loathed George IV. “Respectable” reformers supported Carlile in the name of free discussion. He also published The Principles of Government (1797) by Sir William Jones, known to the Scotts from India. See Wiener, Radicalism and Freethoughts, 49, 19. 27 Robert Scott to Helenus Scott, Scott family papers (1790-1924) together with papers of the Rusden family (1834-1898), Vol. 4, 11/1820, ML MSS A2263; Note that this is despite opportunities that were opening to the ambitious middle-class. Between 1784 and 1847, 14 per cent of the total number penetrating the political elite came from non-traditional recruits, from minor gentle families. On this see, M. McCahill, E.A. Wasson, ‘The new peerage: Recruitment to the House of Lords, 1704-1847’, The Historical Journal 46, no. 1 (2003): 25. 28 Sir Joseph Banks quoted by G. B. Barton from the Brabourne Papers, SMH, January 4, 1890, 8. They were among the wave of nearly 3,000 free immigrants who arrived in the colony between 1821 and 1825. A. G. L. Shaw, The Economic Development of Australia, 5th ed. (Croydon, Vic.: Longmans, 1969), 27.

100 northwest Pacific (1783-1785).29 Walker returned to Scotland where he was painted by Raeburn in 1819 before being lured out of his retirement when appointed Governor of St. Helena.30 Meanwhile, it appears that Scott may well have discussed Pacific trading opportunities with Walker and could have anticipated future trading potential in the South Pacific (as his eldest son’s later activities would suggest).31 Sailing out of Portsmouth, Scott and his two sons were optimistic that they would be able to do much better for themselves in Australia than they could ever do in Britain.32 Their belief in Australia established a further strand that would be indelibly imprinted upon David Mitchell. Disembarking at Sydney in 1821 was Scottish military surgeon James Mitchell (bap.1793-1869). Like Dr Scott, James Mitchell had received a Scottish parish education that emphasised literacy and the importance of learning.33 Scott wrote about the importance of education to himself and to his father, a clergyman in Auchterhouse, five miles from Dundee, who could not afford a legacy to his son beyond an education over which he took great care.34 James Mitchell, the fourth son of a Fife tenant farmer and the daughter of a local laird, was educated in the parish school at Auchterderran, five miles northwest of Kirkaldy.35 It was believed, as Chalmserite clergyman George Lewis wrote in 1834, that at elementary schools like this where the children of lairds and labourers grew up together at the same school they ‘may ever

29 ‘Brigadier-General Alexander Walker of the Bombay Army’, in The Annual Biography and Obituary for the year 1832 (London: Logman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832), Vol. 16, 26. 30 Henry Raeburn, ‘General Alexander Walker of Bowland 1819’, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu no.79/282, New Zealand, online at http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/objects/79-282/ (accessed 20 November 2010). Alexander Walker edited by Robin Fisher and J.M. Bumsted An account of a voyage to the north west coast of America in 1785 & 1786 (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Derek Pethick, The Nootka Connection: Europe and the Northwest Coast 1790-1795 (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1980). 31 Robert Scott was trading from the moment he arrived in Sydney, shipping wool to England, and on the lookout for other consignments that would allow him to expand the family prospects. For details of this see Robert Scott Correspondence ML MSS A2263. 32 Robert Scott to Mrs Helenus Scott, 25 September 1821, ML MSS A2263. 33 Olive Checkland, ‘Education in Scotland, philanthropy and private enterprise’ in Heather Holmes (ed.) Scottish Life and Society: Institutions of Scotland: Education (East Linton: Tuckwell Press in association with The European Ethnological Research Centre, 2000), 65-83. 34 Helenus Scott, The Adventures of a Rupee (London: John Murray, 1783), 3. (DSM/823.69/S426/1B1). 35 An ancient church stood at Auchterderran from the eleventh century. A new church was built in 1789, with an adjacent schoolhouse; they are in use today. Rev. Mr Andrew Murray, ‘Parish of Auchterderran’, In John Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland drawn up from the communications of the ministers of the different parishes, Number XLVLL (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791), 449-461.

101 cherish kind feelings toward each other.’36 James Mitchell’s career was marked by a drive for improvement and medical interest in new ideas.37 Apprenticed to a Kinross surgeon, he furthered his training at the Medical Faculty of Edinburgh’s University, celebrated at the time as the foremost medical school in the English-speaking world. He qualified as a diplomate of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh in 1812, the highest qualification offered by the Faculty. After serving at the fall of St. Sebastian (1813) and at Waterloo (1815), he was sent to Australia as assistant surgeon to the 48th (Northamptonshire) Regiment of Foot, the first Peninsular Regiment to serve in Australia and then stationed in Sydney. That the ‘undounted [sic] firmness of resolution’ that surgeons needed to be successful then was etched into his character is clear from later portraits of him.38 Accounts have overlooked his non-Australian history yet it is of particular note for several reasons. He became a surgeon at the birth of modern medicine, when medical service was swept by professionalisation to contain the proliferation of quacks.39 Medical societies multiplied between 1795 and 1815.40 Their impact in London and Edinburgh was not only medical; as John Millar, President of the Medical Society of London told members in 1776 such changes were the ways by which ‘the chains of ignorance are broken, the charms of mystery dispelled: [and] monopoly and

36 George R. Lewis, Scotland a half-educated nation (Glasgow: 1834), 55 cited in R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 241. Houston argues this is debatable. It is estimated that 10% of Fife’s children attended various types of schools in 1818: Donald J. Withrington, ‘Schooling, Literacy and Society’ in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison, People and Society in Scotland I, 1760-1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers in association with The Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, 1988), 178. 37 Clark, British Clubs, 116. According to Houston’s estimates, Mitchell was one of only 1.5-2% of Scots who attended university. See Houston, Literacy, 242. On literate medical men and medical journals imparting new ideas and the intersection of ideas about medical “identity” and cultural values and claims to specialized knowledge see Susan C. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, Hospital pupils and practitioners in eighteenth-century London Cambridg: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 18, chapter 6. 38 Risse, Hospital life, 65; Sir Andrew Leith Hay, A Narrative of the Peninsular War 3rd ed. (London: John Hearne, 1839), 377 ff. (DSM/946.06/H); M. R. Howard, ‘British medical services at the Battle of Waterloo’, BMJ 297: (24 December, 1988), 1653-1656; Dr James Mitchell, ca. 1855-1865, portrait photograph, ML MIN 360; James Mitchell (Nos. 1, 15, 30, 158, 160), Album of photographs of family and friends, ca. 1863-1892 (possibly compiled by David Scott Mitchell), ML PXC 831. 39 Penelope J. Corfield Power and the Profession in Britain 1700-1850 (London: Routledge, 1995), 137-173. Michel Foucault, Transl. A. M. Sheridan, The Birth of the Clinic, An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock Publications, (1963)1973). Michel Foucault’s study on medicine dates the birth of modern medicine in the last years of the eighteenth century. Medicine takes a positive turn and Western man became an object of science: 197. 40 Clark, British Clubs, 114.

102 exclusion, the last feeble efforts of despotism, abolished’.41 John Millar refers to what Michel Foucault later highlighted when he linked the struggle against disease with ‘a war against bad government’.42 The first task of the doctor became political, as members of the medical profession faced reforms needed for public health. Developing from this, in Berlin in 1848, Rudolf Carl Virchow (1821-1902) promoted the cause of social medicine in the weekly newspaper that he founded, Medical Reform, under the banners that ‘medicine is a social science’ and ‘the physician is the natural attorney of the poor.’43 In light of these developments, James Mitchell’s experience at voluntary hospitals in Edinburgh and London is of note. Associated with his medical education in Edinburgh was the voluntary Hospital for the Sick Poor. A city landmark, it was ‘a monument reflecting humanistic concerns for the lower sectors of Scottish society’ that was a model for Britain.44 Attended by physicians from Edinburgh’s Royal College, this general hospital for the indigent was located from 1741 in a new William Adam-designed facility with 228 beds. Working in the infirmary was the only opportunity students enrolled at Edinburgh’s Medical School had to gain clinical experience.45 Their confrontation with the plight of lower-class patients spurred ‘many future physicians to play active roles in social reform movements’.46 Among them was James Mitchell. He also spent three months during 1817 at London’s Dispensary for Curing Diseases of the Eye and Ear, recently established in 1805 by John Cunningham Saunders (1773-1810) in Smithfield’s Charterhouse Square, only the second eye hospital to be established in London.47 Following Saunders’ premature death, his associate John Richard Farre (1775-1862) continued the dispensary with close to 4,000

41 Clark, British Clubs,115 from J. Millar A Discourse on the Duty of Physicians London 1776, 25. 42 Foucault, Clinic, 33. 43 Theodore M. Brown & Elizabeth Fee, ‘Rudolf Carl Virchow, Medical Scientist, Social Reformer, Role Model’, American Journal of Public Health (December 2006) 96 (12):2104-2105. 44 It was also known as the Physicians' Hospital: Risse, Hospital, 58. On the general need for free hospital provision for the ‘deserving poor’ and sick in Britain (following the sixteenth century closing of monasteries, and the seventeenth century Civil War), and of how Italian leadership in charitable institutions was influential in the eighteenth century, see Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour, Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 239-277. 45 Risse, Hospital, 278. 46 Risse, Hospital, 277. See Foucault about the ‘political’ nature of medicine and the collective experience of medicine at the Edinburgh clinic: Foucault, Clinic, 33, 111, 47 Nick Black, ‘The Lost Hospitals of St Luke’s’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 100(3) (March 2007): 125–129; Noel S. C. Rice, ‘John Cunningham Saunders (1773–1810): His contribution to the surgery of congenital cataracts’, Documenta Ophthalmologica 81, no. 1 (March, 1992): 43-51.

103 patients, largely drawn from among London’s poor, while James Mitchell worked there.48 He brought this experience of voluntary work to Sydney, and his concern for the well-being of the less fortunate would entwine a further philanthropic strand in his future son’s DNA. As will be outlined, the genesis of modern philanthropy both in practical and conceptual terms would be interwoven in David Mitchell’s history. From the perspective of nineteenth-century Europe, philanthropy and Christianity were enmeshed. Christian society was marked by hospitals, hospices, old- age homes, poorhouses, orphanages, and ecclesiastical welfare institutions, specialized institutions providing poor relief, social welfare and care. Public benefaction emphasised spiritual salvation (for both the giver and the beneficiary). Almsgiving was seen as a Christian act. ‘Love of mankind’ was regarded as an essential divine attribute, which every good Christian was bound to emulate by ministering to Christ in the person of the disadvantaged (whether the poor, sick, aged, homeless, or imprisoned). Coleridge, educated at the Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital (England’s largest orphanage and the most famous of its Blue-Coat or charity schools established to educate ‘deserving’ children), believed that a man lacking charity was un-Christian and so could not be redeemed.49 As this chapter explains, Mitchell’s family was firmly placed in this particular tradition of giving. Later, David Scott Mitchell would know that Christ’s Hospital benefitted over time from the benefaction of his maternal forebears Sir John Frederick (1601-1685) and his son Thomas Frederick (1650-1720).50 Sir John Frederick, as President of Christ’s Hospital (1662), was a munificent benefactor who gave generously to his old school in several ways.51 A self-made man, he did much to promote the formation of a mathematical school there; repaired and fitted up the Great

48 Charterhouse Eye Infirmary was moved to a new purpose-built home in 1822 and redesignated the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital in 1837. Ben Weinreb et al. The London Encyclopedia. 3rd rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 2008, 560; Semple Cormack, The Hospitals of London. No. VI, London Journal of Medicine 3, no.30 (June1851):575(-583). 49 The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: W. Pickering, 1836-9), 369 (DSM/824.79/C); Rudolph Ackermann, The history of the Colleges of Winchester, Eton and Westminster: with the Charterhouse, the Schools of St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors, Harrow and Rugby, and the free-school of Christ's Hospital (London: R. Ackermann, 1816); Kaz Oishi, ‘Coleridge's Philanthropy: Poverty, Dissenting Radicalism, and the Language of Benevolence’, Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge 15 (Spring, 2000): 56-70. The school was built on the site of a former foundling hospital. 50 See p. 42; W. Trollope, A History of the Royal Foundation of Christ’s Hospital (London: William Pickering, 1834), 104, 344 (DSM/Q373.42/T); Fellowes, Family, 20, 30. 51 Ackermann, Colleges, 21, 22, 27.

104 Hall at a cost of £5,000; paid to bring conduit water to the school; and left a bequest in his will. Coleridge benefitted from his largesse as did his schoolmate at Christs, Charles Lamb (1775-1834), who would be dearest of all authors to Mitchell.52 Thomas Frederick also gave to the school, leaving a legacy of £2,000 apart from supporting Southwark’s St Thomas’ Hospital ‘to protect helpless men and women against the most grievous blows of fortune’.53 They were following example from the burghers that philanthropy historian W. K. Jordan held up as example. He described them ‘as interesting as they are worthy, because they represent the first really significant advance towards the assumption of civic responsibility’ that lifted human beings ‘above the slough of utter social disaster’ when convulsed by the English Civil War (1642-1651), their institutions being ‘among the noblest of those the spirit of man has ever brought into being’.54 In their philanthropic support (with ancillary civic development) another pattern was set that would mark Mitchell’s outlook. Philanthropic display is culturally specific, activated in response to specific historical situations, and by the second half of the eighteenth century commerce and philanthropy aligned to refigure benevolence and charity. Another pattern that would mark Mitchell’s outlook was the turn to social responsibility and public duty that was then established in philanthropy. The tradition of charitable stewardship, considered the mark and responsibility of social power, was reshaped by eighteenth century consumer culture. In keeping with the conspicuous consumption that marked the era, money and fashion stamped charitable display. Sarah Lloyd demonstrates this by focusing on the festive displays that grew around the anniversary celebrations (or founders’ days) of London’s charity schools.55 Displays of fashion and consumption at these anniversaries saw charitable stewardship embrace entertainment that created social relationships.56 This opened discourse about the meanings of support. When money paid for charitable ends led to fashionable display, how effective were the results and how was charitable philanthropic principle affected? Lloyd shows that

52 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 20. 53 Chaney, Grand Tour, 244. 54 W. K. Jordan, The Charities of London 1480-1660, the aspirations and the achievements of the urban society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), 195, 135, 186 quoted in Chaney, Grand Tour, 268, footnote 16. 55 Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London’, The Journal of British Studies 41, no. 1 (January 2002), 23-57. 56 Frances Boscawen shows these expectations in 1748: Aspinal-Oglander, Admiral’s Wife, 129.

105 philanthropy’s relationship to society, its governance, and structure was central as it was to the reshaping of social relationships that was occurring. Mitchell’s forebears were engaged in this refiguring. Edward Chaney documents the impression made upon eighteenth century antiquaries (among whom was Sir Charles Frederick) of Italian social institutions that were models of governance in giving relief to the sick and poor in sharp contrast to the deficient support then operating in England.57 Changing mechanisms of charitable activity, best illustrated by concerts at Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury (established in 1739) besides London’s charity schools dinners, also refigured understandings of benevolence. This refiguring (that was familiar to the Fredericks and their circle) can be viewed as part of the long evolution of civic sociability and of social institutions that occurred through the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries in the sense of evolving modernity that Jürgen Habermas outlines, whereby supportive action shaped middle-class public opinion.58 The dynamics of social activity both in fellowship and in charitable activity became integral to this evolution of the public sphere in which charity and philanthropy become interchangeable forms of social activity and social support and social progress. Continuing with Sarah Lloyd’s picture, Jad Smith reinforces the influence of John Locke’s epistemology of cultural reproduction upon eighteenth century notions about cultivating improvement on a national scale. Locke’s theory shaped a rhetoric ‘that placed the charity child – and the official church – at the centre of a hopeful yet anxiety-ridden narrative of modern nationhood.’59 Smith illustrates how charity rhetoric took a cultural turn in the early eighteenth century from which ‘there emerged a highly theatrical visual culture of display’ in which the charity child became a visual icon of Britain’s public improvement. Through charity education, children (and subsequently, by extension, the ‘deserving poor’) became vehicles for moral reform that would preoccupy the nineteenth century. Thus philanthropy became tied to social institutions. Later, as the market economy changed, it was recognised that ‘philanthropy was in fact central to political

57 Chaney, Grand Tour, 245. 58 Habermas recognized ‘the public spirit’ as existing from the early part of the eighteenth century when interest was taken in empathy; it became a political force from 1768-1771, following the agitation of John Wilkes. Habermas, Structural Transformaton, 50; 64-5. 59 Smith, “Christian Entertainment”, 37-39.

106 economy’s account of the social order and the role of economic thought within it’.60 As Lloyd says, by the late eighteenth century men and women were changing their understanding of ‘their obligations and pleasures and what it meant to be British and benevolent’.61 Conditions in Britain through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when population rose sharply and rural employment shrank brought this understanding (or discourse about ‘sympathy’ as the eighteenth century knew it, or ‘sensibility’ as Sarah Scott called it) into sharp relief. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) showed that sympathy was essential to good governance; it tied personal virtue to public benefit. Industrialising stress hinted at future urban need and the social concerns that would dominate nineteenth century thought. This genesis of philanthropism would become another significant strand to Mitchell’s life when later in Sydney he witnessed profound social change. Dr Helenus Scott died in Capetown before reaching Sydney. Mitchell never knew his grandfather, but his family followed the example he set, as they followed example set by Frederick forebears.62 His widow, Mitchell’s grandmother, Augusta Scott, followed to Sydney where she died in November 1840, aged 65. Her funeral conveyed sense of the family’s standing.63 Though Mitchell was only four, memory of her lived on in her books and other memorabilia which she left him. With Helenus Scott, she had traveled widely and was open to different cultures. Mitchell inherited from his grandparents their global view and curiosity about the world and its systems and what may be learned from them. Independence rather than nostalgia was the keynote both in family outlook and in the literature available to Mitchell as he grew. The legacy of men from Edinburgh’s Enlightenment – like David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson; the poets Robert Burns and Robert Ferguson, novelists Tobias Smollett, James Hogg and Sir Walter Scott – formed the core of the literature in the family library. It featured optimism in man’s self-improvement. Calvinist virtues promoted

60 Frank Christianson, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 12. 61 Lloyd, ‘Pleasing Spectacles’, 57. 62 Scott died on the voyage, aged 63. Robert and the younger Helenus buried their father in Cape Town, and continued to Sydney, the first of the family (of five sons and one daughter) to reach Australia. 63 ‘The Funeral of the late Mrs. Scott.’ SG, November 21, 1840, 2. She died on November 17, 1840.

107 moral seriousness, piety, frugality, respect for learning, worldly asceticism and a high view of statesmanship, civic affairs, and duty to others. These virtues, and the traditionally democratic outlook of the Scots, were constituents of the literary diet and of family values which Mitchell absorbed. The family had been favoured by the wealth that Augusta Scott had brought to Sydney. When widowed, she was left with an estate of over £24,000 (equivalent today to well over £1M).64 By the time Robert had sold off property which the family owned in Dundee, rationalised his mother’s assets, and put her capital to use in New South Wales where money was scarce, she had an annual income of £2,000 (equivalent today to close to £99,000). To put this into perspective, when James Mitchell became Chief Surgeon at the Hospital, a senior position in the colony’s hierarchy, his annual salary was £273 (equivalent to over £11,000 today).65 When Robert’s only sister Augusta married James Mitchell in 1833 she received a legacy from her father’s estate of £9,000 (equivalent to over £445,000 today).66 This underpinned the commercial ventures that James Mitchell embarked on. He developed these further through his Scottish links. Beyond gaining receipts from grateful patients, James earned interest from lending money. Association with Robert Scott and his Indian connections, (which included the most substantial merchants-turned-settlers like Greenock-born Robert Campbell (1769-1846), and Fife-born William Walker (1787-1854) and his Leith-born nephew Thomas Walker (1804-1886)), contributed to James’ success.67 Robert Scott had ‘an established character for honour’, so their closeness rendered James ‘secure beyond

64 Register Stamp Office Legacy Duty on Residues of Personal Estate, Probate of Will and Four Codicils of Helenus Scott, August 29, 1822, Scott Family Papers, Vol. 8, Robert Scott, Legal and Financial Papers, 1821-1843, ML MSS A2267. For measuring currency see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/ (accessed 2 February, 2010). 65 James Mitchell’s salary was £273.15.0 p.a. in addition to his ‘auxiliary pension’ on half pay, 6/-a day, and free quarters in the Hospital. The colonial secretary’s salary was £2000 in 1835. 66 Scott Family Papers, Helenus, the Elder, Business and Property Papers 1784-1820, Vol. 4, 259, ML A2263. She inherited £6,000 on her father’s death, and £3,000 when she married. For currency conversion see: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/results.asp#mid (accessed 25 October 2009). 67 Robert Campbell (1769-1846) came to Sydney in 1799 to extend trade with Australia from Calcutta where he and his brother partnered a trading company. William Walker (1787-1854) followed Campbell from Calcutta and was joined by his nephew Thomas Walker (1804-86). See Margaret Steven, Merchant Campbell, 1769-1846: A Study of Colonial Trade (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969).

108 the shadow of a doubt’ as a financial broker.68 His mother-in-law’s link with the London bank Grote, Prescott & Grote also helped and he became a director and shareholder of the Bank of Australia and was a member of the board of the Australian Gas Light Company.69 By 1843, ten years into their marriage, Mitchell’s parents had prospered. The Maitland Mercury described James Mitchell in January 1843 as a large landholder, and the proprietor of the colonial cloth manufactory, besides being a candidate to represent the county of Northumberland in the new Legislative Council.70 Throughout Mitchell’s boyhood the excitement of colonial expansion – with parliamentary participation and expeditions into the continent’s interior – gripped attention. His family took particular interest in the almost 4,800 kilometres that the Prussian-born explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848) covered in 1844 with his overland expedition from Moreton Bay and across the far North (over 14½ months to Port Essington).71 The 1846 expedition to establish the new convict colony of North Australia (in what became northern Queensland) was led by Colonial Engineer George Barney (1792-1862) (father-in-law of David Scott, the fourth of Helenus Scott’s five sons who followed to Australia) with Governor Gipp’s aide-de-camp, Edward Merewether (who would later become Mitchell’s brother-in-law).72 Like much of their endeavour, they were overextended and Port Curtis (as today’s Gladstone was known) was abandoned shortly after. Development and the strains that came with progress became another strand to feature in Mitchell’s history. Over-speculation and land mania resulted in financial

68 Both Campbell and Thomas Walker were frugal and philanthropic. Prentis (1983) lists Mitchell as the first Scottish mining entrepreneur and investor of note with extensive entrepreneurial activities. Coal mining and copper smelting were two of his main investments. He built copper smelting works on his Burwood estate at Newcastle, and established the Newcastle Coal and Copper Company in 1853. James Mitchell Papers ML A2026, 242, 224. 69 Augusta Scott’s sister-in-law was Selina Grote, only sister of historian and politician George Grote (1794-1871) and erstwhile banker of his father’s banking house. Prescott’s Bank was one of London’s principal private banks. Established in London’s Threadneedle Street in 1766, it went through several name changes (being known as Grote, Prescott & Grote in 1820 to 1838); it ultimately became part of National Westminster Bank in 1970 before being assumed into the Royal Bank of Scotland. Prescott's Bank Ltd, London, 1766-1903, Royal Bank of Scotland Heritage online at http://heritagearchives.rbs.com/wiki/Prescott's_Bank_Ltd,_London,_1766-1903 [accessed 5 May 2009]. 70 MM, January 21, 1843. 71 Most likely they were among the crowd that attended Leichhardt’s lectures on his expedition delivered at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. ‘Dr. Leichhardt’s Lecture’, MM, August 26, 1846, 4; ‘Dr. Leichhardt’s Lectures’, SMH, August 27, 1846, 2. 72 House of Commons, North Australia: Return of All Expenses Incurred for the Settlement of North Australia. (London: Queen’s Printers, 1848) (DSM/ Q994.4/ G).; John West, John West’s ‘Union of the Colonies’, Essays on Federation published under the pseudonym of John Adams in 1854, Patricia Fitzgerald Ratcliff, ed. intro. (Launceston,Tas.: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 2000), 5.

109 collapse, and insolvencies occurred across every occupation during the troubled 1840s. The monetary crash of 1843-4 spared few; its dire effects reached long into the decade. In Sydney it was said that St Andrew ‘never had his day less in honour [sic] in the colony before. No dinners, no toasting, no balls or other revelry, for men’s minds are full of anxiety, doubt and despondency.’73 Fear chilled Sydney’s life. Business partners with Robert Scott and James Mitchell were declared insolvent.74 Speculative activity like Robert Scott’s suburban subdivisions in Maitland overstretched the family’s financial position, which reached a crisis in 1843. The collapse that year of the Bank of Australia, of which James was a director and major shareholder, burdened him with heavy losses. Like many colonists, he faced bankruptcy. Robert’s premature death in July 1844 overshadowed further losses that were to be endured. Helenus clung on to Glendon until the beginning of January 1848, when the directors of the Commercial Bank of Sydney called in loans totalling nearly £10,000, spelling bankruptcy.75 In 1849 David and Maria Scott were forced off their 2,560 acres on the Hunter River at Bengalla near Muswellbrook owing to public auction of liquidated mortgaged estates of the Bank of Australia.76 Losses like these, and the urgency associated with them, preoccupied the family. Mitchell could not escape hearing about the uncertainty that beset them. Observing their struggle to maintain some control over the forces being imposed upon the close-knit community to which his family belonged impressed him with the importance of kinship and ties of historic continuity. And in a perishable and uncertain world, books at least remained relatively indestructible –which could partly

73 A. B. Spark (Graham Abbott & Geoffrey Little, Eds), The Respectable Sydney Merchant: A. B. Spark of Tempe (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), 164. 74 Robert Scott, Bill of sale of livestock to James Mitchell, January 1843, James Mitchell legal papers, ML MSS 379/Box3X. One example was Hunter region neighbour and prosperous whaler Richard ‘China’ Jones (1786-1852). The first to begin deep-sea whaling from New South Wales, he owned five whalers but lost all his ships when declared insolvent in November 1843. 75 Helenus inherited ‘Glendon’ from Robert Scott, but this brought little relief to his expanding family, with his wife Saranna bearing eleven children within fifteen years (of whom eight survived). They sold the property in stages between 1848 and 1851. See SRO Insolvency Index 01779, 01781; Family History Society Singleton Inc. (Ed.), Singleton District Pioneer Register (Singleton, N.S.W.: The Society, 1989); Allen, Rose Scott, 40. 76 Robert Scott, ‘Last Will and Testament’, 17 July 1844, Robert Scott Correspondence ML MSS A2263. Mitchell was only eight when Robert Scott died in July 1844, yet he was left with a favourable impression of Robert. Mitchell always regarded him highly, which suggests he picked up on how Robert Scott was known in the community where he appears to have been more highly thought than has so far been portrayed.; Schedule of the lots in the plan of partition of the Bank of Australia: the drawing to commence on Monday, January 1st, 1849 (Sydney: Kemp & Fairfax, 1849) (DSM/333/B). At this sale, 11,248 lots of land were drawn from the interest of the failed bank showing the extent of foreclosures that occurred.

110 explain his attachment to them from this time.

4.2 Cultural Influences: Associational culture and ties to philanthropy

In October 1794, London entertainer Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) (uncle of bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin), who would later become one of Mitchell’s favourite authors, presented a new entertainment in his tiny theatre off the Strand, called ‘Great News or a Trip to the Antipodes’. Singing about Botany Bay, he rhymed about ‘The smile of benevolence’ and ‘philanthropy’.77 In present-day popular folklore, Botany Bay is far removed from philanthropy yet philanthropic concern existed from Dibdin’s time for the future of the convicted. Attention was paid to their moral improvement with morally uplifting reading matter (Bibles and religious tracts) made available on board the convict ships. Naval surgeon Thomas Reid dedicated his account of voyages to Australia to the Quaker philanthropist Elizabeth Fry (1780- 1845).78 Prison reformer Fry sought to rehabilitate characters, minds, and souls; surgeons like Reid, who were responsible for the health of convicts being transported, reminded them of the transformative possibilities that their transportation offered them. Efforts made by penal reformers such as Fry and her well-intentioned followers like Reid, and assistance given by James Mitchell at voluntary hospitals, were part of the ‘new humanitarianism’ or ‘new humanitarian politics’ that gained ground in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was an era that was swept by empathy, when it was asserted that morality was required for civil society. In the 1780s bluestocking writer Hannah More questioned the hypocrisy of Britain, where those whom Britain disdained were enchained while the nation prided itself on being ‘where the soul of Freedom reigns’.79 In the 1790s many felt that Britain’s most pressing needs were moral and spiritual. With the religious education of poor children linked to national polity and the charity child the grand experiment in cultural production that Jad Smith shows

77 Charles Dibdin, Great news, or, a Trip to the Antipodes (London: C. Dibdin, 1794-1795). 78 Thomas Reid, Two voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822). 79 Hannah More, Slavery (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1788), ll.251-2.

111 took hold through the eighteenth century, likewise the concept of transformation became attached to the practice of transportation as part of the refigured culture of Britain’s moral transformation that writers like More and Coleridge argued was necessary. Christian reformers like Elizabeth Fry gave assistance without the personal ties that underpinned patronage and assistance given during much of the eighteenth century. They helped people for whom earlier activists would have felt no charitable obligation and thus fostered moral responsibility.80 Wider generosity was coupled with values that were nurtured by imperial culture. This stressed personal responsibility. The military campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars saw promotion based on courage and accomplishment over rank or favour.81 An increasingly influential egalitarian ethos developed as part of building Britain’s new society.82 These sentiments and the humanitarian sensibilities of the later eighteenth century were carried to New South Wales. When applied there they showed the colony’s civilised nature. This was because as David Garrioch shows ‘philanthropy was central to the Enlightenment’s definition of itself’ and ‘was a crucial part of new collective identities’.83 Care given to the indigent following the establishment of the colony’s first public charity in 1814 (known as the Benevolent Society from 1818) was regarded as benevolence that was characteristic of Britons.84 Philanthropy became tied to colonial pride, inseparable to the notion of the ‘free-born’ Briton world-wide.85 Abolition ended in 1833 in Britain. The same year child labour was limited to 8 hours and subject to government inspections with the passing of the First Factory Act. Robert Owen (1771-1858) gained a reputation as a humanitarian businessman at

80 Amanda Bowie Moniz, ‘Saving the Lives of Strangers: Humane Societies and the Cosmopolitan Provision of Charitable Aid’, Journal of the Early Republic 29, no.4 (2009): 607-640. 81 Kirsten McKenzie, ‘Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no.3 (2003) http://muse.jhu.edu.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/search/results?search_id=1805014344&action=re load (accessed online September 21, 2010). 82 Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier violence and the bush legend’, History Australia 6, no. 3 (December 2009): 67.1–67.19. 83 Garrioch, ‘Making a better world’, 496, 490-1, 495-6. 84 Anne O’Brien, ‘Kitchen Fragments and Garden Stuff’, AHS 39, no. 2 (2008): 154. 85 A. Porter ‘Trusteeship, anti-slavery, and humanitarianism’ In Porter, A., ed., The Oxford history of the British empire – volume 3, the nineteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198– 221 cited in Lambert and Lester, ‘Geographies’, 329. Enlightenment thinkers like the physiocrats emphasised the importance of philanthropy to social stability and national prosperity: Garrioch, 492.

112 New Lanark, where he introduced trend-setting social reforms like sickness and old age insurance.86 Britons found that Charles Dickens weighed on their social conscience with the publication of Oliver Twist (1838-9). By mid-century Caroline Chisholm urged that ‘the good Samaritan be taken as the standard of action’.87 She believed that if ‘benevolence and goodness…our common Christianity [should be] made the ground-work of the whole’ then ‘the integrity of Britons will not fail as a body’. The moral integrity of Englishmen and their benevolence had become a patriotic issue: it is ‘the feeling that has made the flag of victory wave wherever England’s banners have been carried.’ Chisholm (who was known to the Mitchell family) argued that her Family Loan Society and family colonization system, by which funds were advanced to allow families to reunite in Australia, could not fail as a self-supporting system of emigration.88 Success was due to the code of honour amongst the working classes that she believed held more weight than a court of law. She cited industrial association that would-be emigrants were acquainted with: the ‘group-system’ – a collectivity that not only matched the contemporary democratic pulse (as seen in Chartism) but was also widely practiced among the working class. Historians like Marguerite Dupree support Chisholm’s view. Dupree recounted that ‘mutual aid, or help from within a group of like-minded people, [that] was widely practised over a wide range of working-class activity in towns and cities’, and buttressed the working class against poverty. Such collectivity offered them ‘a route to self-help and some degree of financial security and personal welfare’.89 This ‘group system’ originated among the labouring class and ‘involved a

86 Robert Owen, Lectures on an entire new state of society, comprehending an analysis of British society, relative to the production and distribution of wealth, the formation of character, and government, domestic and foreign (London: J. Brooks, 1830) (DSM/211/R). 87 Caroline Chisholm, The ABC of Colonization (London: John Ollivier, 1850), 32-33 (DSM/325.901/12A2) 88 Public servant Francis Merewether, Edward Merewether’s cousin, neighboring the Mitchells at their Cumberland Street home, was immigration agent in 1841 when Chisholm established her Sydney Immigrants Home. Helenus Scott’s father-in-law, George Keylock Rusden in East Maitland, was known for his assistance to immigrants. 89 Historians support Chisholm’s view: Dupree notes that many nineteenth-century commentators remarked on the prevalence of the assistance of the poor to the poor, and how open-hearted and open- handed the poor were to the poor. Marguerite Dupree, ‘The provision of social services’, In The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, 1840–1950, edited by Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 358. On mid-eighteenth century belief in how self-help associations contributed to the public and national welfare, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63, Note 93.

113 collective strength absent from the middle-class pursuit of self-help by individual enterprise.’90 Such notions were familiar to the Scott-Mitchell family from their experience with radical sympathisers like Richard Carlile and James Mitchell’s medical experience in Britain. Moreover, in Sydney their proximity to the working poor came from the Mitchells living within the artisanal quarter just above and nearby the dense squalor seen in the lower streets of the Rocks area. Walking past the area it would have been impossible to ignore the ‘cold damp unwholesome smells [that] assailed the nose combining with other disagreeable impressions of the place.’91 James Mitchell’s experience in Sydney as an employer in his industrial ventures gave them further proximity. As surgeon he treated patients at Sydney’s hospital where those who suffered industrial accidents were taken. Communitarian spirit was thought to be conducive to social progress. Examples that inspired Mitchell’s father and others like him included Robert Owen’s A New View of Society (1814-18), which argued that character was formed by environment and that villages of cooperation were preferable to large industrial towns.92 Further example came from the cooperative societies that sprang up in the industrial areas of northern England and Scotland in the late eighteenth century. Many nineteenth century industrial towns had a cooperative society, founded on the principles espoused by Robert Owen, by which the profits of an enterprise were shared out among the members.93 Cooperatives were based on the belief that industries and commercial concerns should be owned and controlled by the people working in them for joint economic benefit. Cooperatives were a model of economic organization that involved the voluntary association of producers or consumers for the purposes of sharing profits and managing the collective interests of the group.94

90 Marguerite Dupree, ‘Social services’, 359. 91 W. S. Jevons, ‘Sydney by night’ in Barry Groom & Warren Wickham (comp.) Sydney: The 1850s, The Lost Collections, Eyewitness Accounts and Early Photographs of Sydney Published in association with the exhibition ‘Sydney –The 1850s’ held at the Martin Place Branch, C.B.C. Bank, Heritage Week, 2nd-28th March, 1982 (Sydney: Macleay Museum, 1982), 80. 92 Robert Owen, A new view of society; of, Essays on the formation of the human character preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind, 4th ed (London: Longman, 1818) (DSM/335.1/0). 93 Robert Owen, Lectures on an Entire New State of Society (London: J. Brooks, 1830) (DSM/211/R). 94 Many cooperatives limited themselves to the task of uniting consumers in order to maximize buying power (like at Rochdale near Manchester). Rochdale was the site of the first consumers’ cooperative, the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’, inspired by Owen and established in 1844. R. G. Garnett, ‘Records of Early Co‐operation with Particular Reference to Pre‐Rochdale Consumer Co‐operation’, Local Historian, No. 9, (1971): 4.

114 The principle of mutual assistance was not unfamiliar to the Frederick family with their long history of mercantile activity and with joint-stock companies (like the English East India Company, and private banking). David Garrioch explains how the sentiment of ‘sympathy’ for others that marked Enlightenment thought grew from the development of market capitalism; he cites Thomas Haskell’s illustration that international trade created threads of interdependence.95 Britain’s private banks had a strong mercantile background; Prescott, Grote & Co. began as merchants.96 The Scotts and James Mitchell lived through time of banking change when banking expansion followed industrialization, before limited liability was introduced, and before mutualism was overtaken by late nineteenth century individualism.97 When they arrived in Australia in the 1820s their London banking connections gave them financial advantage. Exchange was conducted by goods rather than currency, mutual support was the method of exchange in trade, and ‘connection was more desirable than money’.98 Scotch capital was ‘highly mobile’ according to Ian Donnachie, who cites the example of bounty immigrant James Brown (1827-1977) who worked for James Mitchell before venturing into coal exporting.99 Mutual assistance was also part of medical experience and known to be beneficial.100 The early nineteenth century saw the ‘gradual increase of medical control over all aspects of the institutional experience’, as James Mitchell experienced.101 Michel Foucault stresses the ‘collective’ structure of medical

95 Garrioch, ‘Making a better world’, 494. Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility’ in The American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985): 559. 96 Ben Brudney, ‘Gentleman Bankers, The Self-Perception of the Financial Elite in the City of London, 1792-1848’, Diss. Columbia History Department, 2009, Ch 1, note 54. 97 J. Carles Maixé-Altés, ‘Enterprise and philanthropy: the dilemma of Scottish savings banks in the late nineteenth century’, Banking and mutualism: Accounting, Business & Financial History 19, no. 1, (March 2009); 39–59. 98 Robert Scott to Mrs. Scott, undated letter c.1825-1828. Robert Scott Correspondence ML MSS A2263. Mercantilist policy was invoked by philanthropy historian David Owen who regarded well administered charities as instruments of mercantilist policy, safeguarding national power in their ensuring a stable workforce. Owen, English Philanthropy, 18. 99 Ian Donnachie, Scotland and Australia, Social and entrepreneurial migration 1850-1914 or the making of ‘Scots on the make in the colonies’: paper presented at the BASA Conference, University of Warwick, 1-2 April 1985 (Warwick: British Australian Studies Association, 1985). 100 Stuart Hogarth, ‘Joseph Townend and the Manchester Infirmary: a plebeian patient in the Industrial Revolution’ in Anne Borsay & Peter Shapely, Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c.1550–1950 (Aldershot; Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2007), 91-110. Michael Brown, Review of ‘Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c.1550-1950’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 4, (Winter 2008):940 (939-941). 101 Grahm Mooney & Jonathan Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting in Historical Perspective: Themes and Issues’, Clio Medica 86 (2009), 10. 7-30

115 experience.102 Foucault goes further and draws on eighteenth century Paris physician, and the chief translator of Paine's works into French, François Lanthenas (1754- 1799), who defined medicine as ‘the knowledge of natural and social man’.103 Medicine became more than technical mechanics applied in curing ills. Medicine embraced ‘knowledge of healthy man, that is, a study of non-sick man and a definition of model man.’104 Historians of the medical enlightenment of the eighteenth century and early modern medicine (like Steve Sturdy) and of social policy (like Martin Gorsky) present the new voluntary hospitals (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) as sites for social management. Both read them as being ‘in pursuit of a common social project, namely the relief and domestication of the poor.’105 They were philanthropic enterprises, which reconciled ‘hitherto divergent social, political and religious interests within a single institutional endeavour’.106 As such they embodied the national and global transformation project that Britain embarked on through the nineteenth century. Alison Twells refers to this as when the Victorian middle classes adopted ‘missionary philanthropy’ to undertake social and cultural transformation of the ‘problem with England’ question. The mission was a civilizing and a ‘healing’ of the social cancer that Coleridge had railed against. In 1798 Coleridge wrote of England, All individual dignity and power Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions, Associations and Societies, A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild, One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery, We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth; Contemptuous of all honourable rule,

102 Foucault, Clinic, 110. 103 Foucault, Clinic, 35. 104 Foucault, Clinic, 34. 105 Steve Sturdy (ed.), Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000 (London: Routledge, 2002); See also Bronwyn Croxson, ‘The Public and Private Faces of Eighteenth-Century London’, Medical History 41, no. 2 (1997): 141; Roy Porter, ‘The Gift Relation: Philanthropy and Provincial Hospitals in Eighteenth-Century England,’ in The Hospital in History, ed. Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter (London; New York: Routledge, 1989), 149-78. 106 Mooney & Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting’, 2009, 21.

116 Yet bartering freedom and the poor man’s life For gold, as at a market!107

Coleridge charged Britain with hypocrisy. Britain, he said, was a nation where the ‘sweet words of Christian promise’ were so corrupted that everyone the briber and the bribed, Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest, The rich, the poor, the old man and the young; All, all make up one scheme of perjury, That faith doth reel. Coleridge argued that ‘cultural’ values are embodied in a ‘clerisy’, a central educated group, which stands as an ideal for the rest of society. Christian society could be achieved if every man acted ‘personally and in detail wherever it is practical’, measuring his effort ‘by his power in his sphere or action’.108 Analogies have been drawn between the medical profession attempting to ameliorate the illness and injury presenting to them and the remedy required of the

ailing body politic. Kathleen Wilson sees the voluntary hospitals as forms of government and argues they were radical models of governing by participation, openness and accountability.109 This view echoes earlier seventeenth century respect for Italian charitable institutions like Naples’ hospital of the Annunziata that were novel to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English travellers. The custom of Christian Charity that impressed them, one observer noted, ‘resembles Platoes Republique in part’.110 Further complexity appears in the understandings of ‘good’ that Mitchell was

107 ‘Fears in Solitude’, lines 60-80 in Donald A. Stauffer (ed.) Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge (New York: Random House, 1951), 66. 108 Coleridge, ‘A Lay Sermon’, Complete Works (London: 1853) vi, 225 quoted by David Roberts, ‘Tory Paternalism and Social Reform in Early Victorian England’, in Stansky, Victorian Revolution, 147-164,159. 109 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Urban Culture and Political Activism in Hanoverian England: The Example of Voluntary Hospitals,’ in Eckhart Hellmuth ed. The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990): 165-84. 110 Edmund Warcupp, Italy, in its original glory, ruine and revival…(London, 1660) 264-5 quoted in Chaney, ‘Grand Tour’, 261. By the early nineteenth century, mechanisms of assistance were more complex so that understandings of terms of assistance (‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’) became interchangeable (much like the way that visitors’ functions at hospital visits overlapped). On the abiding influence of Plato on the philosophy of ‘objective’ idealism that was inspired by Coleridge and took hold in Britain’s universities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with implications on the public library movement see Alistair Black, A New History of the English Public Library, Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850-1914 (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 145-6.

117 born into. His grandfather demonstrated the public utility of reason (Coleridge’s ‘heavenly Science; and from Science Freedom’). Bluestockings like Sarah Scott and Hannah More demonstrated the idea of ‘public good’. James Mitchell and his hospital experience added to family impressions of building community by association.111 Sense of building a ‘new society’ in Australia, and of missionary philanthropy that was needed, was familiar also to the Mitchell family with the younger Helenus Scott in 1835 marrying Saranna Rusden, the daughter of Anglican clergyman and the first in the district of Maitland, George Keylock Rusden (1786- 1859).112 The Reverend Rusden was a noted educator in England and a linguistic scholar.113 The Rusdens prized education. Their reading was anchored in biblical reading besides their reading of classical Greek and Roman lettres and of comparative languages. This invested them with a sense of cultural awareness and a deep sense of historical continuity.114 Clerical connections deepened further when in 1852 Saranna’s sister Rose married Winchester-educated Arthur Edward Selwyn (1823-1899), future Anglican dean of Newcastle (from 1892), and with whom the Church believed that ‘continuity was safe’.115 Selwyn’s family counted a number of key figures in the Victorian church. Cousins were the brothers George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878), D.D., Bishop of New Zealand and Lichfield, and a hero of the Victorian Age; and William Selwyn (1806-1875) who as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity nurtured the study of theology at Cambridge University from 1855. Up to the early 1850s young men from Sydney had to go to Britain for university education to qualify for professional registration (so as to, for example, practice at the Bar). Many forewent tertiary study, discouraged by the expense let

111 Coleridge, from ‘Religious Musings’ (1794), line 26, in Stauffer, ‘Selected Poetry and Prose’, 97. 112 Rusden’s Parish covered almost 200 kilometres from the lower Hunter Valley to the north-west New England region. For stamina required of him see Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 87. He also operated East Maitland’s first bank with assistance from his daughter Emily. Allen, Rose Scott, 41. 113 Papers related to the Rusden and Spence families, 1824-1928. SLV MS 9699; A. P. Elkin, The Diocese of Newcastle, A History of the Diocese of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, (Glebe: Australasian Medical Publishing Company, 1955), 87. 114 For the influence of biblical criticism, classical philology, and comparative linguistics on historiography in the nineteenth century, particularly the rapid uptake of historiographic beliefs, theories, methods, and cognitive values shared among historians and other disciplines see Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past, A Philosophy of Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 46. 115 Elkin, Newcastle, 516.

118 alone the hazards entailed in journeying the distance to Britain and back. Parents were doubly torn, concerned that their sons should not lose advantage to be gained from tertiary study while anxious about moral hazards that might imperil a young man during the long separation from family that going abroad entailed. Cambridge provided Sydney with the model for imparting a superior education. Cambridge alumni were prominent among Fellows of Sydney’s University from its inception, who sought ‘the foundation of a like inheritance for our children in the Anglo- Antipodal world’.116 Appointed by the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1851, considerable excitement surrounded the establishment of the first university of British settlements in the southern hemisphere.117 No less than Sir John Herschel, the foremost scientist of the day, responsible for opening up the southern heavens, vetted the applications from candidates for professorships for the university.118 Mitchell turned fifteen in March 1851 with the expectation that he would read at the soon-to-be-opened University of Sydney. Neighbour and close family friend Francis Merewether was involved from the beginning with the developments leading to the opening of the University as both its second Vice-Chancellor and a member of the founding Senate of the new University from 1850. Instituted ‘for the better advancement of religion and morality and the promotion of useful knowledge’, the University was open to the colony’s male residents of all classes and denominations without any distinction to pursue ‘a regular and liberal course of education’.119 Admission was by examination, to judge the sufficiency of candidates, and was competitive. Anglican minister John Couch Grylls (1793-1854) was chosen to prepare

116 Joseph K. Walpole, Recollections and Historical Notices of Cambridge: preceded by a Brief Outline of Schools and Universities, and the Fortunes of Literature and Science from the Earliest Ages (Sydney: Kemp and Fairfax, 1847), 75 (DSM/378.42/W); Cambridge alumni who were close to the Mitchell family were Edward Hamilton, the Provost at Sydney, a Fellow of Trinity College; Francis Merewether, Vice-Chancellor from 1854, Chancellor from 1862; and barrister John Bayley Darvall. Darvall was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1833; M.A., 1837), as was Francis Merewether (B.A., 1835). Note too that H.R.H. The Prince Consort was Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1847-1861. 117 CUS, 1853. The University of Sydney was established by an Act of the Legislative Council in the session of 1850; the members of the Senate met for the first time in February 1851. The University of Melbourne was established in 1855. 118 Papers relating to the University of Sydney and to the University College, Sydney, New South Wales: Printed at the desire of Sir J.F.W. Herschel, Bart., G.B. Airy, Professor Malden and H. Denison (London: Printed by Richard Taylor, 1851) (DSM/378.91/P); Initially three professors were appointed: Rev. J. Woolley, D.C.L. (Classics); Mr M. B. Pell, M.A. (Mathematics); Dr. J. Smith, M.D. (Chemistry and the Philosophy of Physics). University Calendar, 1853, 37. 119 CUS, 1853.

119 Mitchell for matriculation. This choice in part stems from Boscawan Cornish connections and from James Mitchell’s devout faith: he was one of the larger donors to the Sydney Church of England Diocese, besides giving to the missionary Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.120 More importantly, the selection of Grylls is revealing in terms of his own background and the contribution he made to Mitchell’s outlook. Grylls came from humble beginnings and to a degree was an example of the self-taught. He was the son of a stone engraver from south-east Cornwall; his brother was an agricultural laborer. Showing the degree to which families applied themselves to self-improvement, both gained clerical positions at Plymouth’s Royal Dockyard.121 Working there for twelve years, Grylls also pursued theological training and ran a private school at nearby Devonport, where he taught classics to his cousin John Couch Adams (1819-1892), the mathematician and astronomer. Intending to come to Australia with Grylls, Adams went to Cambridge instead.122 There he later became the fifth Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry (1859-1892), after mathematically predicting the existence and position of Neptune.123 While his cousin became celebrated for having gone deeper than any man since Newton into the inner workings of Nature, Grylls went to Sydney in late 1838 to build the colonial Anglican church.124 Throughout his life, Mitchell kept a portrait of Grylls, sketched by colonial portraitist William Nicholas (c.1809-1854), made when Grylls was aged in his late fifties and as Mitchell knew him.125 His treasuring this signifies the mark Grylls left on him. Family culture stressed learning, and Grylls reinforced this view importantly

120 He was one of the larger donors to the General Purposes Fund. Sydney Diocesan Society, Report of the Sydney Diocese and Society in connection with the Societies for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and for Promoting Christian Knowledge for 1854 (Sydney: Joseph Cook and Co., 1855), 51. James Mitchell was a lay delegate at the 1859 Conference of the Anglican Church. 121 For background on the Grylls family see Richard G. Grylls, Grylls and Grills: the history of a Cornish clan (London: R. Grylls, 1999). 122 W.G. Adams, 28/11/1893, Papers of John Couch Adams, St Johns College, Cambridge, MacAlisters Biography Correspondence Box29/24,4 123 Adams calculated this around 1846. See Tom Standage, The Neptune File: Planet Detectives and the Discovery of Worlds Unseen (London: Allen Lane, 2000). 124 Grylls oversaw the construction of St James Old Cathedral, Melbourne. For background on the Reverend Grylls: Grylls, Grylls and Grills, 68-75; Papers of J. C. Adams, St. John’s College, Cambridge; ‘The late Rev. J. C. Grylls’, SMH, May 6, 1854, 4. Impression of the dutiful sense required of colonial clergy and the difficult circumstances under which they worked is given by: Brian Roach, ‘“Neither bread enough nor to spare”: paying the Anglican parson in early colonial New South Wales’. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 90, no.1 (June 2004): (1)-21.18. In terms of the dedication and energy required of George Rusden see Elkin, Newcastle, 87-91. 125 William Nicholas, Rev. J. C. Grylls, First Clergyman in Victoria, 1852, ML P2/237. Nicholas’ sketch was one of the last items Mitchell handed over to the State Library before his death.

120 in terms of how education should be freely available. From 1845 Grylls ran a night school for working men at St Philip’s Church, Sydney. This was located nearby the Mitchell residence at Miller’s Point, which was one of the principal residential areas in Sydney for the artisan class.126 Grylls viewed education as an essential tool to meeting pressing social needs. He was attuned to these needs and to concerns about social responsibility having been stationed for thirteen years (1825-1838) at Saltash, Cornwall, where he also held successively offices of Alderman, Magistrate and Mayor, positions that show the leadership experience that he had and the esteem in which he was held. Already aligned to these concerns via his father’s engagement with supportive social ventures, Mitchell would further appreciate their importance from Grylls’ perspective. Grylls preached a moral evangelism and ethical democracy based on common morality that was in keeping with Evangelicals centered at Cambridge who were inspired by Coleridge. Broad churchmen who disregarded the Established Church’s idea of the elect, they stressed the moral responsibilities of the better-off towards the poor.127 They attacked the link between religion and the established social and political order as Richard Carlile and his supporters did.128 Cooperation and education were central to a Christian Socialist viewpoint. There was a practical and an egalitarian approach to their moral evangelicalism: in their association with the Working Men’s Institutes offering working-class men education that was otherwise beyond their reach; and in establishing the first college for the higher education of women.129 Besides Working Men’s Associations, Christian Socialists promoted industrial and provident societies and crusaded for sanitary reform. They propagated their ideas by their literary activities. Family sympathy with Christian Socialist principles can be inferred from the

126 William Stanley Jevons, ‘Remarks upon the Social Map of Sydney, 1858’ (1854-1859), ML B864.; Waugh & Cox, Waugh and Cox's Directory of Sydney and its Suburbs (Sydney: Waugh and Cox, 1855), 20 (DSM/ 981.1/ W). 127 Torben Christensen, Origin and History of Christian Socialism 1848-54 (Aarhus, Denmark: Universitetsforlaget, 1962), 137-142. 128 Robert Hole stresses this should not be underestimated. Writing for Carlile (when he was imprisoned) Julian Augustus St. John attacked religion as a ‘state engine’, used to defraud the weak and ignorant. Hole, Pulpits, 206. 129 Working men’s associations were the Christian Socialists’ main effort at social reform. They began with sympathy for working-class aspirations. They worked for an associationist type of social organization, which they hoped to achieve through adult education. This led to the Working Men’s College. On women’s education see Rosalie Glynn Grylls, Queen’s College 1848-1948: Founded by Frederick Denison Maurice (London: G. Routledge, 1948).

121 literature the Mitchells read by Christian Socialist leaders like Maurice and Kingsley among others.130 The Mitchells were among the propertied and educated to whom Kingsley directed his appeal to help ease the misery of the masses. Mitchell was widely read in the literature that came from those who supported the Christian Socialist Movement, including French socialist theoretician Charles Fourier who argued that poverty threatened the happiness of all.131 Sympathies held within his family matched Christian Socialist collectivist ideology. Christian socialists looked askance at laissez-faire capitalism and favoured a society of greater equality based on co-operation. ‘The direct object of Christian cooperation was to bring Christ into every part of common life’, wrote Thomas Arnold, ‘to make human society one living body.’132 Going beyond F. D. Maurice’s aims to awaken the church to its social obligations, sympathy with Christian socialism is evident in the library of Mitchell family friend Edward Wise (1818-1865). A pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby School, Wise’s literature included George Jacob Holyoake’s history of the Rochdale cooperative, the monthly The Cooperator, and The Co-operator’s hand-book by English cooperator Edward Vansittart Neale to whom Mitchell was distantly related through German blood-lines running in the Frederick family.133 Family members led in establishing the Mechanics’ Institutes in Melbourne, Newcastle and Sydney. The Mechanics’ School of Arts in Sydney opened in 1833, with James Mitchell a life member (one of twenty).134 Two years later, a Mechanics’

130 Frederick Denison Maurice, Has the Church of the State the Power to Educate the Nation? A Course of Lectures (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1839) (DSM/370/M); Richard Proctor, The new evangel according to Richard Proctor, Christian Socialist (Maitland, N.S.W.: T. Dimmock, 1891) (DSM/335.7/P). 131 Charles Fourier, The passions of the human soul, and their influence on society and civilization (Transl. and introduction by Hugh Doherty. (London: Baillière, 1851) (DSM/157/F ). Thomas Arnold, Christian life, its hopes, its fears and its close : sermons preached mostly in the chapel of Rugby School, 4th ed. (London : Fellowes, 1845) (DSM/252.03/A). 132 Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11. 133 George Jacob Holyoake, Self-help by the people: history of co-operation in Rochdale (London : Holyoake & Co., 1858); The Cooperator: A Record of cooperative progress by working men (London: F. Pitman, 1864); Edward Vansittart Neale, The co-operator's hand-book: containing the laws relating to a company of limited liability, with model articles of association suitable for co-operative purposes (London: Holyoake & Co., c.1860); Fellowes, Family of Frederick, 49-50. For Neale’s central role in the Cooperative Movement see Philip N. Backstrom, Christian Socialism and Cooperation in Victorian England: Edward Vansittart Neale and the Co-operative Movement, (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 3. 134 J. D. Atkins (Comp.), The Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts: Diary, 1833-1845 (Sydney: J. D. Atkins, 1981), 42; For the relationship between a scientific education and the socio-political purpose of

122 Institute opened in Newcastle with Walker Scott the founding treasurer.135 At the opening of Melbourne’s Exhibition Building in October 1854, Mitchell’s uncle George Rusden (1810-1903), then clerk of Victoria’s executive council, addressed the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institution. He extolled the ordinary, working person as key to the future, vesting the true greatness of a country in the hearts and hands of its sons.136

4.3 ‘Self-Help’ and communitarian ethos: The shape of Progress Faith in Science and advancement was an underlying mantra to the elder Helenus Scott’s circle of progressive late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century thinkers. Their post-Enlightenment belief in progress by rationality, the idea that the welfare of society could best be promoted by scientific, rational, organized means, led to the ‘Self-Help’ mantra of the Victorian Age.137 Self-improvement was most manifest in colonial circumstances where everything needed to be transformed. From the early 1820s, being among the first to settle in the Hunter River region (near Cessnock and at Newcastle), this ambition underlay the activities of the Mitchell-Scott-Rusden clan. Mitchell’s family contributed to developing the facilities and mechanisms that emerging economies (as in Newcastle) and new cities (like Sydney) needed. They worked within a closely networked community to build a new society, one that aspired to civility and promised opportunity, and they drew on a communitarian ethos to do so. The substance of communitas in building their urbanising development is

Mechanical Institutes see Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes, Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 31-74. 135 Newcastle Mechanics' Institute, Library, and Museum (N.S.W.), The laws and regulations of the Newcastle Mechanics' Institute, Library, and Museum (Sydney: Stephens and Stokes, 1835). 136 His father, George Keylock Rusden presided over the mechanics institute that was established two years later in East Maitland. Patricia Curthoys, ‘State Support for Churches 1836-1860’ in Bruce Kaye, ed., Anglicanism in Australia, A History (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 41; G. W. Rusden, Gathering Together for the Good of Work and Learning: A Lecture on the occasion of opening the Exhibition Building, in Melbourne, October 1854 delivered in the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institution (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1857) (DSM/042/P6). Rusden donated books to a number of Mechanics Institutes in Victoria. G. W. Rusden Personal and historical papers Royal Historical Society of Victoria Library MS 13280, 17501-14 and 22228-35; Box 171-180. 137 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 51. The value system and moral orientation of the Victorian era was stamped by Scottish-born author Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859). Smiles proved example himself of participation in voluntary societies: R. J. Morris, ‘Samuel Smiles and the Genesis of Self-Help; the retreat to a petite bourgeois utopia,’ Historical Journal 24 (1981), 89-109.

123 illustrated by the erection of the Holy Trinity Church at Millers Point in Sydney.138 Building the church gave example of a collective sense of individual responsibility of the kind that the Presbyterian theologian, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Chalmers fostered in Scotland.139 Historian Stewart J. Brown describes this as ‘a practical programme of comprehensive Christian communal reform, emphasizing benevolence, co-operation and shared sacrifice’.140 Chalmers believed in voluntarism and mutual aid within the local community rather than statutory poor-relief assessments and payments which he thought undermined moral values. He saw family responsibility and personal independence as the pillars of a Christian society. When St Philips church became too small for Sydney’s growing population, it was James Mitchell’s brother-in-law, David Scott, who (among the parishioners calling for another church to be built) raised funds for the new church within a year. With the foundation stone laid in 1840, Holy Trinity Church (a stone’s throw from the Mitchells’ home) became the first official Garrison Church of the colony and official Parish Church for Government House. Grylls was first rector of the church, appointed in 1843. As magistrates, industrial entrepreneurs, and generous benefactors, Mitchell’s family shared with others their interests in developing Sydney’s civility and civil society. Social responsibility and the voluntary principle figured largely in family models: their activities spanned across medicine, law, literature, commerce, religion, and politics. As magistrates they were familiar with the inadequacy of social legislation for the mobile population of the Australian colonies, as much literature of the day hints at.141 Need for reform was clearly apparent to them. Their appreciation for the contribution that voluntarism made to democratic governance underscored

138 Further example came from others in the Mitchell circle. Particular friend of Robert Scott, E. C. Close (1790-1866), built St James Morpeth, the first church completed and consecrated in the region. Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 32; Elkin, Newcastle, 111. 139 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body, British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 103; Stewart J. Brown, ‘Thomas Chalmers and the communal ideal in Victorian Scotland’ in T. C. Smout, ed., Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 61-80. 140 Stewart J. Brown cited by Irene Maver, ‘The Temperance Movement and the Urban Associational Ideal: Scotland, 1820s to 1840s’ in Morton et. al. Civil Society, 163-4. 141 Including problems arising from bushranging, criminality, prostitution and duplicity, which the Goldrush compounded: B. C. Peck, Recollections of Sydney, the capital of New South Wales (London: John Mortimer, 1850), 60, 64-5 (DSM/981.1/23A2); Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, being Brief Notes of Three Years’ Experience of Social, Literary and Political Life in Australia (London: Sampson Low, 1859), 42-8 (DSM/981/91); ‘Domestic Intelligence. The Bigamy Case’, SMH 24 May 1850, 2.

124 their support of endeavours across colonial economic, social and cultural life. Their sympathy for the links between these charitable and cultural endeavours and civility and civil society underscored the importance of philanthropic support. Their concern for colonial well-being was part of the ‘surge of social consciousness’ that according to historian Gerturde Himmelfarb became Victorian religion.142 Their support of social ventures (then understood as charity but also extending into cultural support) was widespread. Family example could only impress Mitchell with the importance of generosity in making civil society. It gave him example of models for giving. Altruism and giving occurred generously in Mitchell’s circle, where social needs were met with social action throughout his life. Both his parents actively supported voluntary mutual aid groups established for functional purposes. James Mitchell was involved at the Sydney Dispensary, initiated in 1845. David Green and Lawrence Cromwell’s account of Australia’s Friendly Societies disparages the treatment offered there, but stresses that high medical fees charged in the colony were beyond the means of most of the population.143 This illustrates the necessity for the service that the Dispensary gave to Sydney’s less fortunate residents. The first report of its Board shows the care provided, and suggests this was a welcomed social service.144 The extent of James Mitchell’s other activities suggest that he was inspired less by the greed that Green & Cromwell imply characterised Sydney’s (largely charlatan) surgeons or druggists, than sympathy with F. D. Maurice’s call to ‘humanize’ society. James Mitchell served as a board member of the Australian Mutual Provident Society, begun as a friendly society which insured lives, annuities and endowments from 1849; this involvement with mutual life societies was of the kind which Christian socialists promoted. He supported the Australian Subscription Library (from its beginnings in 1826 and later as chairman)145; and was benefactor to

142 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 49. 143 David G. Green and Lawrence G. Cromwell, Mutual Aid or Welfare State, Australia’s Friendly Societies (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 76. 144 Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary, The first report of the Board of Directors of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary, established in the month of July, MDCCXXLV with a list of subscriptions and donations, recieved during the year 1845 (Sydney: D. Wall, printer, 1846) (DSM/ 042/ P237). 145 Frank Bladen, Historical Notes, The Origin and Development of the Public Library of New South Wales, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Government Printer, 1911), 30, 75. Referring to his thirty-seven years service

125 St Paul’s College, Sydney University and the Sydney School of Arts Mechanics’ Institute. He also served on the medical board (becoming president in 1852). Questioning whether institutions were ‘made for the immediate use and convenience of mankind’, eighteenth century Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith debated the purpose of civil society and engendered a sense of public spirit.146 Public sociability and public safety were presented as aspects of civilized society. So too was public duty. James St. John’s stepping into Richard Carlile’s editorial shoes in 1819 showed how far bluestocking notions of ‘care’ extended. Philanthropy extended to democratic participation when sympathizers with Thomas Paine (like St. John) defended and supported the printers and booksellers (like Carlile), who were releasing Paine’s writing despite unjust prosecutions. Their effort put philanthropy behind British liberty; in this sense (it was thought) philanthropy underpinned society. In his book Utilitarianism (1871), John Stuart Mill expanded on the sense of ‘duty’. He wrote: ‘Though it is only is a very imperfect state of the world’s arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.’147 In a return to fundamental Christian principles, the spotlight turned on the ‘virtue’ of giving. These ideas about ‘care’ went to New South Wales. just as beliefs about self-improvement and transformation were carried there. The nineteenth-century legacy from eighteenth century philosophes was the search for practical solutions to pressing needs in the surrounding world. Rapidly expanding nineteenth century cities impelled philanthropic activity in similar fashion to the way that hospitals and charitable institutions to assist the needy were established with the rise of towns in the medieval era. The nineteenth century needed services to mitigate poverty, disease, and ignorance that would impede progress. Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew made the Victorian era acutely aware of urban

on the committee (1832-1869), so overlooking his membership from the start in 1826, Bladen notes that Mitchell took a ‘warm personal interest’ in the ASL. 146 William Smellie, Literary and characteristical lives of John Gregory, M.D. Henry Home, Lord Kames. David Hume, Esq. and Adam Smith, L.L.D.: to which are added A dissertation on public spirit; and three essays, 1740-1795 (Edinburgh: Printed and sold by Alex Smellie, 1800) (DSM/ 920.042/S). 147 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 4th ed. (London: Longman, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1871), 23 (DSM/171.5/M).

126 social problems. They showed that it was time to put society in order and their pens triggered Victorian activists to do so. Helping to alleviate pressing social ills during the Victorian era became at once self-improving and a moral act. Christian duty and evangelical moralism moulded Victorian beliefs in doing good so that philanthropic activity became an essential duty. The ‘sympathy’ espoused by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century advocates of ‘care’ (like Hannah More and William Wilberforce) would require different architecture for support in changing nineteenth century conditions. Initially, public benefaction was viewed as a new ‘morality’ and this coincided with more rational approaches taken to organizing affairs within a world of increasing specialization. London ‘fashionables’ like Sir Joseph Banks discussed the observations of Massachusetts-born Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753- 1814) while warming themselves from his ‘Rumford Stove’.148 Described as ‘the most original spirit of his era’, Rumford also established an influential model that attempted to control poverty.149 In Bavaria, he converted Munich’s beggars into a workforce: making clothing for the army they earned a surplus for the State coffers.150 Rumford’s social engineering was anchored in Enlightenment views that saw poverty as a social ill that could be cured by determined and appropriate action. At the same time, it looked ahead to nineteenth century practice.151 He restructured Munich’s charity system, centralizing charity collections into a united fund and forbidding individual solicitation.152 His observations led Sir Thomas Bernard (1750-1818) (who espoused vaccination with Helenus Scott) to organize the Society for Bettering the

148 Heat was a central topic of ‘natural philosophy’ in the late eighteenth century and Thompson who was a physicist applied his study of fundamentals to make practical applications. Generating effective heat, Rumford Stoves became the rage. Rumford Stoves were installed in the houses of Sir Joseph Banks. Owning one marked that one belonged to fashionable society. Egon Larsen An American in Europe, The Life of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (London: Rider and Company, 1953), 115, 116; On the proximity of Rumford within Helenus Scott’s circle see p. 97, note 21. 149 Vrest Orton, Observations on the Forgotten Art of Building a Good Fireplace 16th ed.(Dublin, New Hampshire: Yankee Books, 1986), 21. Rumford is descrbed as a typical versatile 18thcentury man.; John Stephen Martin, ‘Count Rumford’s Munich workhouse: poverty and enlightened social theory in eighteenth-century Bavaria’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 263, (1989): 206-208. 150 Orton, Forgotten Art, 19. On the Military work house in Munich see Larsen An American in Europe, 125-129. 151 Andrew, Philanthropy and the Police’, 13-22. Rumford’s action was part of a wave of institutions set up in Europe, like the ateliers de charité established throughout France in the early 1770s. See Garrioch, ‘Better world’, 490-1. 152 Sanborn C. Brown, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1979), 133.

127 Conditions and Increasing the Comfort of the Poor in 1796.153 Moreover, action like this established example that would be built on through the following century. Three years later Rumford helped Banks establish the Royal Institution of Great Britain ‘for the instruction of the general public on the improvement of practical devices in the scientific world’.154 Like Rumford’s later philanthropy, this initiative reflected increasing institutionalization in science (as would develop further into the nineteenth century, including with philanthropy).155 In the spirit whereby Dr Helenus Scott during the late eighteenth century personally pursued information to benefit the ‘public good’, Science during the nineteenth century became the fulcrum for philanthropic activity with support given to scientific endeavours. Since the philosophes, support (that was either paid for by an individual or by subscribers or given in kind) was provided to institutions and individuals for the increase of knowledge. This support became a distinctive feature of modern Western science. Sir Joseph Banks supported the Yorkshire-born farrier and botanist George Caley (1770– 1829) for ten years, employing Caley as his personal collector at 15s. a week to collect specimens in New South Wales (1798-1809).156 Links like this, and with scientific associations like the Royal Society, extended benefaction conceptually and practically. The principle of giving assistance to scientific endeavors, whether by individuals or by groups (like the Royal Society and its 1831 offshoot the British Association) extended to wider public engagement. In the United States, American astronomer and Union Army General, Ormsby Mitchell (1805-1862) raised funds for a telescope and observatory in Cincinnati in 1842–1843 by asking local residents for money. In 1855, a public subscription to publish natural history researches by the prominent Swiss-born paleontologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) became the first nationwide appeal in support of science. In the 1850s and 1860s Agassiz personally

153 Brown, Benjamin Thompson, 214-5. Sir Thomas Bernard also originated the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. 154 Orton, Forgotten Art, 20. 155 Author unknown (probable author Charles Tomlinson), Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society: a popular biography, with an historical introduction and sequel (London: John W. Parker, 1844), 54-57. (DSM/A925.8/B218/18A1). Rumford created a research prize, and left an endowment for a scientific chair at Harvard University ‘for the improvement of the useful arts, and for the extension of the industry, prosperity, happiness and well-being of Society’. See Brown, Benjamin Thompson, 306. 156 Anne Secord, ‘Caley, George (1770–1829)’, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/52518 (accessed April 10, 2009); Author unknown (probable author Charles Tomlinson), Sir Joseph Banks, 86.

128 raised half a million dollars from many sources for his autonomous Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where he remained after lecturing in Boston in 1846.157 These models from science spread whereby broad support came from citizens (as French citizens funded the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1885). In 1878 the Royal Society of New South Wales raised a subscription fund to commemorate the name of the Rev. W. B. Clarke and his services to the colony in the form of an annual course of free public lectures on geology and a Gold Medal to be given from time to time to reward meritorious contributions to geological science.158 The Clarke medal was the first medal awarded for Australian scientific achievement. An early recipient was Saranna Scott’s cousin, geologist Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn (1824-1902) for his contributions to Australian geology.159 In the course of the nineteenth century the culture of giving broadened as it became integral to the way the Victorian Age viewed itself in a case of collective ‘Self-Help’ (or mutual self- reliance) in the widest sense.

4.4 The Voluntary Principle, cooperatives and mutual aid groups

Sydney’s Mechanics’ Institute was a demonstrable example of collective self-help, whereby community support underwrote educational aspirations. When the School of Arts was established in 1833, it was begun by a ‘little band of earnest-minded men’, who resisted the sneers at their ‘Utopian idea’ of making a liberal education widely available.160 Funded by membership subscriptions and fund-raising events, it was among the many Mechanics’ Institutes that mushroomed in Australia. These advanced liberal knowledge or useful skills (like Mathematics) when there was little opportunity to achieve them elsewhere. Its sometime president, William Windeyer,

157 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 55. 158 SMH, September 19, 1878, 6. 159 Alfred R. C. Selwyn & George H. F. Ulrich, Notes on the Physical Geography, Geology and Mineralogy of Victoria (Melbourne: Blundell & Ford, 1866) (DSM/559.2/1A1). 160 As they would be described fifty years later when William Windeyer celebrated the Institute’s success: W. C. Windeyer, Commemorative address on the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, March 22nd, 1883 delivered by Mr. Justice Windeyer (Sydney: Batson & Atwater, 1883) (DSM/ 607.91/ N).

129 who championed public education, called the Institute a philanthropic success. In the usual way that philanthropic ventures were set up in Sydney, where government matched subscriber contributions, the Institute was established by voluntary contributions from members and the community. In truth its beginnings were shaky, until solicitor George Kenyon Holden (1808-1874) revived the Institute in 1853. An associate of James Mitchell, Holden began his career as secretary to Scottish jurist and publicist Sir James Macintosh (1765-1832), a friend of Dr. Helenus Scott and a man of wide intellectual sympathies.161 Believing in cooperative social ventures and in tune with the democratic temper of the day, Holden was intent on ensuring that the Institute serve as more than a subscription library.162 He upheld cooperative societies in Germany and Britain as models to emulate. Among Holden’s model institutions of self-help were the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, the cooperative store which Lancastrian flannel weavers established in 1844. Holden quoted Lord Brougham to describe the rapid increase and progress of over 500 cooperative societies across England and Wales in 1864, with sales exceeding £2.5 million.163 He pointed to Henry Briggs & Son, proprietors of the Whitwood and Meathley Collieries in Yorkshire, the first English mine owners to share profits with labour. He promoted industrial example as came from Halifax carpet manufacturers Sir Francis and John Crossley who converted their business, the largest carpet manufacturer in the world, into a public company so that each of their 4,500 employees could share in the profits and invest in savings.164 Holden believed in cooperative social partnerships, which entailed mutual help to extend self-help and achieve self-reliance. For Holden, such collective self-help was the means by which

161 ‘Death of Mr. George Kenyon Holden’, SMH, April 18, 1874, 9; Sir James Mackintosh, The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851) (DSM/824.71/M). On the exchange of ideas among Scottish-born imperial administrators like MacKintosh and their influence on Australian development see Sylvester, ‘Governor Lachlan Macquarie’, 33-37. 162 For examples of these in Sydney see: Commercial Reading Rooms and Library (Sydney, N.S.W.) The rules and regulations of the Commercial Reading Rooms and Library (Sydney: Printed by Kemp and Fairfax, 1842) (DSM 042/ P62); Australian Medical Subscription Library, Catalogue of the Australian Medical Subscription Library, established in 1846: with rules and regulations (Sydney: The Library, 1855) (DSM/042/P9); Baker's Sydney Circulation Library, Juvenile library: catalogue; rules and regulations to be observed at Baker's juvenile library and Baker's Sydney circulation library (Sydney: Hibernian Printing Office, 1842). 163 George Kenyon Holden, An enquiry into the new relations between labour and capital induced by co-operative societies, labour partnerships and other forms of productive industry in which labour is employed on a footing more independent than common hire with some reference to special features of colonial industry (Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1867), 9. 164 Holden, An enquiry, 15.

130 sand could be turned into gold.165 In his view, mutual-assistance arrangements added to the stability of popular government.166 Under Holden’s steerage, the Institute became a community hub.167 Sydney’s Institute blossomed (like Mechanics’ Institutes elsewhere), there being demand for their classes in geometry and mathematics as practical subjects for which there was a following at a time of large-scale urban building. Sydney’s School of Arts was a model of social action (not unlike the Rochdale Cooperative and Holden’s other models). It was a successful enterprise that embraced cooperative (communitarian or mutual) self-help and philanthropy (personal acts of aid). Contributions came from members and the community; it was substantially underwritten by James Mitchell and others. Labour historian Raymond Markey notes that associations like these (and benefit societies) were all ‘part of the ambitious working class culture of Australia’.168 Matching the democratic temper of the times, the Institute was a participatory democracy. It gave example of the interchangeability that existed in perceptions and practices of support (what Brett Fairbairn has described as the ‘fuzziness’ existing in the encounter between philanthropy and self-help).169 It was a model of social action, of group self-help in which cooperative self-help and philanthropy overlapped. As such it was an influential model for philanthropy as it was evolving during the second half of the nineteenth century. Philanthropy is a product of its time and mutual help was essential in a young society where resources were scarce. In England, mutual life societies encouraged members to save money by taking out life policies thereby establishing self-help through planning and financial protection. Likewise in Sydney, where the Australian Mutual Provident Society opened for business in January 1849 with the object of

165 Holden, An enquiry, 25. 166 Holden, An enquiry, 29. 167 Cyril Pearl, Brilliant Dan Deniehy, A forgotten genius (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1982), 18. As Pearl notes, it was the only centre of adult education. 168 Raymond Markey, ‘The history of Mutual Benefit Societies in Australia, 1830-1991’ in Marcel van der Linden, ed., Social Security Mutualism, The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies (Bern; Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996), 164. 169 Brett Fairbairn, ‘Self-Help and Philanthropy: The Emergence of Cooperatives in Britain, Germany, the United States, and Canada from Mid-Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century’, In Thomas Adam (Ed.) Philanthropy, Patronage and Civil Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 55, 72, 75. Fairbairn describes the overlap between cooperation and philanthropy a ‘little-examined territory’. His opinion is that ‘the concept of self-help, especially self-help in groups, is more complex than it at first appears and conceals a variety of cross-class, institutional, and community relationships that can amount to philanthropic patronage.’

131 placing within the reach of all classes of the community ‘the advantages of insuring their lives, securing Deferred Annuities, and providing Endowments for Children’.170 This form of self-help was regarded as doing more than anything to prevent a poor law in the colony. Becoming paupers on a parish list in England was deeply dreaded owing to poor law procedures. Consequently, those seeking better lives who migrated to Australia (where there was no poor law) would rather suffer some privation and provide for their old age by paying contributions to the Society.171 The Society initiated world-wide example with the proceeds of the Society’s life policies and annuities (pensions) protected against creditors. By 1879 the Society was the third largest life office in the British Empire. By 1895 The Cosmos Magazine reported that Australians averaged a higher level of Life Assurance at over £20 per head, than the £15 per head in Britain and America.172 James Mitchell served on the Society’s board, where he promoted the virtues of saving and the self-reliance of the working classes. This was in keeping with deep-rooted self-reliant traditions in Scotland that favoured administering local support as was needed over prescriptive state based methods. Peter Clark estimates that from the 1780s friendly societies promoted self- help and moral reform among the poor and these were increasingly numerous in Scotland by the end of the eighteenth century.173 This promotion was equated with advancing toward and establishing self-reliance. Scottish custom of stewardship united mutualism, philanthropy and business investment – from voluntary donations given at the Kirk door to Savings Banks supporting local enterprise to grow the local economy.174 This manner of ‘group-help’ – with philanthropic deeds practiced widely across classes – fostered self-reliance. As Olive Checkland wrote, ‘over the years, the

170 Advertisement, ‘Australian Mutual Provident Society’, SMH, January 1, 1859, 2. Benefit societies had been attempted earlier. The colonial press reports the formation of between 18 to 20 trade societies between 1831-1848 (most formed between 1840-43). Announcement of the ship and boat builders forming a Benefit Society: SG May 5, 1831, 2.; These were largely formed for benefit purposes; some sought to protect themselves against competition from unskilled workers. A Friendly Societies Bill was enacted in 1843: The Australian November 25, 1843, 3. 171 ‘Odd Fellowship & Provident Societies’, SMH, May 9, 1849, 3. 172 ‘An Eldorado in our Midst, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States’, The Cosmos Magazine, February 28, 1895, 339. 173 Clark, British Clubs, 371, 384. 174 J. Carles Maixé-Altés, ‘Enterprise and philanthropy: the dilemma of Scottish savings banks in the late nineteenth century’, Banking and mutualism: Accounting, Business & Financial History 19, no. 1 (March 2009), 56 39–59.

132 role of the philanthropist has, in Scotland, been vital’.175 Mutual help – the practice of giving and sharing – had long been part of working society. In English and Scottish villages, harvesting was commonly a mutual effort. Mutuality evolved as a concept of shared interests. In the industrialized workplace of the early nineteenth century, cooperative enterprises developed from managers and employees recognizing that they held mutual goals, influences and responsibilities and could enjoy mutual rewards. The Victorian era’s ethos of Self- Help saw traditions of mutual aid evolve into organizations that included insurance co-operatives, fraternal societies, community doctor schemes and burial clubs. Marguerite Dupree observes how extensive voluntarism or voluntary activity was in Victorian Britain, and how significant this was in creating social stability in the growing towns. Adopting definitions outlined by social welfare historian Geoffrey Finlayson, she shows that historians have divided voluntarism into different sectors: informal, voluntary and commercial.176 Most extensively practiced was the informal sector which included support given within kinship networks and neighborhoods. Voluntary support ‘without financial gain to itself’ aimed to benefit the community. It included both self-help or mutual aid (‘help from within a group of like-minded people’), which was extensively pursued across Britain.177 Accordingly, it followed that in Australia James Mitchell received dedicated labour in return for allowing workers to tenant his land in Newcastle rent-free (as a form of payment in kind as was traditionally paid to rural workers in Britain).178 Voluntarism also included charity (which Dupree defines as ‘the advancement of the interests of others, rather than of self’) and philanthropy (‘upper- or middle- class concern, often generalised or institutionalised, for those who occupied a lower station in life’). These aimed ‘to promote the interests of others’. Finally, the commercial sector included welfare initiatives for profit, such as insurance companies or private medical practice. As she shows, voluntarism was the principal form of support through the nineteenth century, ahead of localized support of poor law

175 Checkland, ‘Education in Scotland, Philanthropy and Private Enterprise’, 65. 176 Marguerite Dupree, ‘The provision of social services’, in Martin Daunton (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History of Britain Vol. 3. 1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 351, 355; Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994/2002), pp. 6–8, 46. 177 Dupree, ‘The provision of social services’, 358. 178 Dupree, ‘The provision of social services’, 353.

133 guardians and local authorities (which was greater than any centralized state support).179 Gertrude Himmelfarb supports this, quoting the French historian Hippolyte Taine, who remarked in 1861 that the English sense of obligation to contribute to the ‘common good’ (what Taine called ‘public business’) was considered to be an Englishman’s business in the same way that a Frenchman dedicated himself to his private business affairs.180 Stained-glass windows in churches were a standard memorial to a family’s honour. Typically they emphasized patrilineal descent and signaled the continuity and solidarity of a family’s lineage over time. Unusually, James Mitchell paid £100 for the east window of Sydney’s Garrison Church on behalf of his wife as her memorial to her parents.181 If a mark of the Victorian belief in responsibility by and to kin that Dupree noted was a striking feature of the mid-nineteenth century, the window would also serve to remind David Mitchell of the history of his family’s sense of ‘duty’ (or ‘public business’). It was designed by East London glass painters Charles Edmund Clutterbuck (1806-1861) and his son Charles Clutterbuck (1839- 1883). The elder Clutterbuck trained as a miniature-painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy before designing glass.182 His earliest recorded stained glass window, which shows the Crucifixion, was installed above the altar in the chapel of the London Charterhouse in 1844 (which stood nearby the Charterhouse Eye Hospital where James Mitchell worked).183 This association makes Clutterbuck’s window appear quite deliberate. The Mitchell family were most likely mindful of the generosity shown to the poor by the founder of the London Charterhouse, Thomas Sutton (1532- 1611), a foremost philanthropist. Coincidental history – just centuries apart – could not be overlooked, with Sutton and James Mitchell both pioneering the coal trade, lending money and acquiring land.184

179 Dupree, ‘The provision of social services ‘, 356. 180 Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 50. 181 SMH, October 26, 1878, 5. 182 Sussex Parish Churches, 2011 online at www.sussexparishchurches.org (accessed 15 February 2011). Clutterbuck pioneered modeling designs based on historic examples from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See Joyce Little, Stained Glass Marks and Monograms (London: National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies, 2002), 29. 183 Andrew Saint (ed.), Survey of London No. 18 The Charterhouse (New Haven; London: Yale University Press for English Heritage on Behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 2010), 101, 103-4 (illustrated in figs. 65-66). 184 Dupree, ‘The provision of social services’, 356.; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Sutton, Thomas (1532– 1611)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, 2008 at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26806 (accessed 18 Feb 2011).; N. R. Shipley,

134 Both David Mitchell’s parents provided examples of giving generously. His mother raised funds to benefit the community, working with several ladies’ committees (as for a charity bazaar to benefit St. Catherine’s, the Clergy Daughters’ School at Waverley). Charity bazaars, which Frances Trollope called ‘Fancy fairs’ in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), were popular. Articles shipped from Britain sold well, significantly raising funds that went to charity; in Britain, by 1830 roughly thirty per cent of charitable subscriptions came from women.185 As Trollope noted, fetes took advantage of ‘that great object of all English Christian enthusiasm – the disbursement of money’.186 In New South Wales, community members willingly donated to building funds with which to erect church buildings. Examples included the Cathedral Fund for Sydney’s Anglican community in 1868, and in 1870 for the completion of the Cathedral pinnacles.187 David Mitchell’s father sought to build a church at Stockton in Newcastle and his brother-in-law paid for the building of St. Augustine’s Church at Merewether, the Newcastle suburb named after him. Supporting the colonial church’s need for buildings was a local investment, a civic duty that benefitted the community. Churches, hospitals and universities were among the main beneficiaries of colonial philanthropists. A close family friend was John Campbell (1802-1886), merchant Robert Campbell’s eldest son, and a generous benefactor and mainstay of the colony's growing Church of England.188 New configurations of bricks and mortar were important events in the annals of nineteenth century urban centres. Institutions devoted to healthcare were focal points (as they were in Britain by the Victorian period).189 They excited the populace

‘Thomas Sutton: Tudor-Stuart money-lender’, Business History Review, 50 (1976), 456–76. Sutton found coal on leased estates near Newcastle-on-Tyne. Sutton linked education to commercial advantage, anticipating Victorian practice so was thought of in the later nineteenth century as founding the equivalent of a technical school: A. H. Tod, Charterhouse (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1900), 10- 11.; Philip Temple, ‘Sutton’s Hospital’ in Saint, Survey of London No. 18 The Charterhouse, 59-85. 185 F. K. Prochaska, ‘Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century England’, The Journal of British Studies 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 62-84 especially 71, 83; Also, F. K. Prochaska, ‘Women in English Philanthropy, 1790-1830,’ International Review of Social History XIX Part 3 (1974): 442-45. 186 Bremner, Giving, 105. 187 Letter from Alfred Stephen to Sir Robert Herbert, October 6, 1890, Sir Alfred Stephen Papers Correspondence 1874-1890, ML MS211/3; S. M. Johnstone (Revised by J. H. L. Johnstone), The Book of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1937/1968), 37-8. 188 H. McCallum, ‘Campbell, John (1802 - 1886)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 1, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), 199. 189 Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting in Historical Perspective: Themes and Issues’, Clio Medica 86 (2009), 20; Anne Borsay, ‘Persons of honour and reputation’: the

135 because they represented the arrival of new benefits. Graham Mooney & Jonathan Reinarz show in their history of the culture of visiting charitable hospitals that opening new hospitals or asylums was ‘cause for a mass invasion’. Drawing on the opening of new isolation hospitals in Oldham (1870s), Nottingham (1890s) and Edinburgh (1900s), they show how visitors inundated the buildings ‘…well before the patients themselves were admitted’.190 Similar excitement, and certainly civic pride, met the opening of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary in 1845.191 Two dozen like-minded subscribers invested £1,200 as a permanent endowment to establish the institution. Operating independently of Government aid, it vaccinated children and provided medicine and medical treatment to the increased number of the afflicted and the needy. The Infirmary helped over 12,000 patients in its first year when the population in Sydney was inching towards 90,000.192 A founding member of the Infirmary, James Mitchell was one of twelve volunteers who were immediately responsible for its running. Dispensaries long cared for the poor; over time voluntarism at dispensaries prompted better organised and funded services for public health. By 1851 the Infirmary was a hospital with close to 200 beds and admitted at least 1,500 patients each year. Central to medical care in Sydney, it was recognised as a teaching hospital for medical students. James Mitchell became a life governor in 1852. Caring activity (like hospital visiting) at such institutions was a procedure that historians associate with ‘the ordering of the urban community…[where]…the conduct of citizens was regulated’.193 To explain voluntarism like this, Mooney refers to ‘deep philanthropy’, in which ‘the financial donation was predicated by a certain watchfulness on the donor’s part’ because this ‘ensured the suitability of the deserving patient on the one hand [the recipient of assistance], while offering personal

voluntary hospital in an age of corruption, Medical History 35, no. 3 (July, 1991) 281-94 available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1036481/ (accessed 19 November, 2010). 190 Mooney & Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylym Visiting’, 14. 191 On comparable examples in Britain: Dupree, ‘The Provision of Social Services’, 361. 192 Report of the Sydney Infirmary from 1845-1854, 6; SMH, January 27, 1845, 2. Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary, The first report of the Board of Directors of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary, established in the month of July, MDCCXXLV with a list of subscriptions and donations, received during the year 1845 (Sydney: s.n., 1846) (DSM/ 042/ P237). The population in Sydney in 1849 was 90,000. 193 Mooney & Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting’, 23.

136 involvement and gratification for the donor on the other.’194 Besides introducing the ‘social control’ thesis of historians, Mooney is expressing what became de rigeur from the 1850s and with the institution in 1869 of the Charity Organization Society (COS), the leading philanthropic association of the Victorian Age.195 Mitchell observed from his father’s experience that working with cooperative social ventures involved close association that meant giving time as well as money. This was most clearly demonstrated in James Mitchell’s involvement with what began as a reading society shortly after his arrival in Sydney.196 By March 1826, the Australian Subscription Library (ASL) became more formalised as essentially Australia's first library. It was a membership library drawn up along the lines of subscription libraries that many of its members knew in Britain.197 Membership was by ballot either as a proprietor or original member with an entrance fee of £5 5s and an annual subscription of £2 2s, or as a Subscriber at £3 3s a year, with honorary membership to servicemen and clergymen.198 It opened in late 1827 with about 1000 books in Pitt Street. James Mitchell joined as a foundation member and became a long-serving committee member, steering the library through its affairs up to his death

194 Mooney & Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting’, 21; Steve Sturdy, ‘Introduction’, in Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000 (London: Routledge, 2002), 9; Roy Porter, ‘The Gift Relation: Philanthropy and Provincial Hospitals in Eighteenth Century England’, in L. P. Granshaw and R. Porter (eds), The Hospital in History (London: Routledge, 1989), 149-78; A. Borsay, Medicine and Charity in Georgian Bathy: A Social History of the General Infirmary, c.1739- 1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 195 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 53. Himmelfarb qualifies this poses difficulty because ‘it can be neither proved nor refuted, since any empirical fact can be interpreted in accord with it.’ In turn the COS exercised pressure upon government to initiate social action; the COS recognized that poor relief work required the greater authority and financial resources of state agencies. See R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780-1850: An Analysis’, The Historical Journal, 26, no. 1 (March, 1983), 109. 196 SG 1/3/1826. This began in 1822. Thomas de la Condamine (1797-1873), Private Secretary to Governor Darling, proposed the idea for the library. Books were in mind at the time, with the purchase of Governor Brisbane’s library in 1825. 197 A catalogue of books in the circulating library of William M Garvie: Australian Stationary Warehouse, George Street, Sydney (Sydney: Mansfield, 1829); Manley, K.A. “Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries as Community Libraries.” Library History 19, no.3 (November 2003): 185-194; C. D. Richardson, ‘The Colony's quest for a national library’ in Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings 47, no.2 (1961):66-7; F. M. Bladen, Historical notes: The Public Library of New South Wales (1911):2-3, 69. 198 SG 22/3/1826; Australian Subscription Library, At a general meeting of subscribers of the Australian Subscription Library and Reading Room: held at the Sydney Hotel on the 26th of February 1826, J. Mackaness Esq in the Chair, the following gentlemen were nominated the original members of the Institution...(Sydney: Robert Howe, Government Printer, 1826). It opened in No. 1 Terry’s Buildings, Pitt Street and was claimed for many years as the only library in the whole of Australasia.

137 in 1869.199 Though it offered members novels to read, its purpose was less for the amusement that Coleridge saw kept most devotees of England’s circulating libraries engaged in ‘a sort of beggarly day-dreaming’ rather than in reading.200 It took a ‘high’ ground regarding literature’s use for knowledge rather than being for entertainment and was generally a reference library. This ‘moral’ stance did not prevent theft from its reading room. By 1829 an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette appealed for the return of stolen copies of Cook’s Voyages and Humes History of England.201 General meetings and lectures, and meetings of ‘learned society’ groupings, were held in the Library’s premises. These became the stage where those attending shared belonging to a fraternity attached to a common literary culture. The Library was where longer established residents could orient newer arrivals to colonial culture and values. Improving societies like these abounded in urban society through the nineteenth century. The associative activity that they fostered represented efforts at social community and worked hand-in-glove with the principle of self-help. The flourishing in Sydney of improving societies is indicated by the number of associative groupings which existed. Some were primarily social organizations like the Australian Club (established in 1838 and of which James Mitchell was Vice-President). Other efforts at building a social community were made through intellectual and cultural approaches, like the ASL; the Sydney Philharmonic Society (whose activities Augusta Mitchell promoted); the Australian Museum (established in 1836 and which James Mitchell served as a trustee) and the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts (in Pitt Street), which James Mitchell also supported. A number were benevolent societies like the Society for the Relief of Destitute Children presided over by Colonial Secretary (later Sir) Edward Deas Thomson (1800-1879), with whom James Mitchell worked closely as Thomson then also presided over the Australian Club. Mitchell, his father, and uncle David Scott patronised the Philosophical Society of New South Wales. Though small in number this was important nonetheless for the intellectual culture which members nurtured. Membership illustrates their network of sympathy and engagement: officers included Sir Charles Nicholson (1808-

199 The library moved in 1844 into premises on the corner of Macquarie and Bent Street, diagonally opposite where the State Library of New South Wales stands today. 200 Raymond Irwin, The Origins of the English Library (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1958), 208. 200 SG, 2 October 1829.

138 1903), provost (later chancellor) of the University; John Woolley, M.A., D.C.L. (1816-1866) principal and professor of classics at the University; and Sydney solicitor G. K. Holden. Mitchell family friends numbered among the 180 members in 1857. Among these were William Bland (1789-1868), first president of the Australian Medical Association; future commissioner for railways John Rae (1813-1900); and registrar-general Christopher Rolleston (1817-1888). Holding mutual interests, the society became a form of ‘cooperative’ where members met (in the premises of the ASL) for mutual economic assistance, to share knowledge and experience and exchange ideas on subjects tending to develop colonial resources. Designated at their inaugural address as a ‘Scientific Association’, members sought information which they could apply to developing the prospering economy and society they were opening up themselves.202 They delivered papers on steam communication with England, the iron-making resources of New South Wales, sanitary reform, railways, and the process of photography.203 The Philosophical Society was among the rash of voluntary associations that mushroomed in nineteenth-century cities across the world. These sprang up simultaneously in the three decades before 1850: lecture halls, schools, libraries, charities, and societies devoted to ‘the diffusion of knowledge’. All were badges of the new fluid, competitive, and rapidly changing urban environment of those decades. Championing higher values, they were at once constructions of ‘civil society’ and laboratories for public experience on neutral ground of ‘civil society’. They were extra-political, as historian Howard Wach argues; they were where conceptions of social and political organization, hierarchies of knowledge, and prescriptive foundations of public and private morality were debated.204 They opened a ‘culture’ where the boundaries and languages of social relations could be tested, and civic culture could be defined. They were part of what R. J. Morris called an ‘ordering of order’,205 where ‘various realms of urban power – governmental and non-

202 Royal Society of New South Wales, Transactions vol.1 (1867), 7. 203 On 13 August 1856 James Mitchell read a paper before the Philosophical Society on the impregnation of Sydney water with lead. 204 Howard M. Wach, ‘Unitarian Philanthropy and Cultural Hegemony in Comparative Perspective: Manchester and Boston, 1827-1848’, Journal of Social History 26, no. 3 (Spring, 1993):542. 205 R. J. Morris, ‘Governance: Two Centuries of Urban Growth’ in R. J. Morris and R. H. Trainor (eds), Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 1.

139 governmental – interact, abrade or are mutually constitutive with it’.206 Morris points to the attractions of the voluntary society. Joining an association entailed mild formal but limited commitment. This suited a situation in which migration rates and town size meant that significant numbers of people had the need and motivation to cooperate together, but lacked the degree of trust and shared values created by kin and communal ties.207 Sensitivity about this sharpened in Sydney’s aspirational society due to convictism. Historians speak of the ‘moral policeman’ intent on ensuring social cohesion in the scenario, where those with economic and social power seek to defend, justify and extend that power and rule by an oligarchy selected from the higher status members of the society and which normally followed.208 Social order and social cohesion was a sensitive matter in a community that began as a wall-less gaol. Serving as magistrates, the Scott family were closely acquainted with the significance of social control beyond preserving law and order. They experienced the perils posed by bushrangers and threatening assigned convicts like ‘The Jew Boy’s Mob’ that terrorized the Hunter River district before they were hung in 1841. Helenus Scott was recommended in 1844 for a colonial order of merit for his service as district warden of Patrick’s Plains.209 Memories of Jacobite disturbance and mob insurrection remaining alive among elder members of community and added to nervousness about ‘social order’. Moreover, French presence in the Pacific added to concerns about security when the colony lacked means of self-defence beyond a voluntary citizens’ ‘militia’ that presented more show than force. Others, like the Scotts and James Mitchell, were alive to the crackdowns on liberty that they knew of from late Georgian and Regency days in England and military rule in New South Wales.210 Concerns with the issue of dissent and freedom of the press are clear from the many items on these issues found within James Mitchell’s library and later in David Mitchell’s library. In this context, it can be seen that community leaders like

206 Mooney & Reinarz, ‘Hospital and Asylum Visiting’, 23. 207 R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary societies and British urban elites, 1780-1870: an analysis’, Historical Journal, 26, no. 1 (1983), 112. 208 Ibid., 99-100 101; Bivona, ‘Poverty, Pity’, 67-83. 209 Governor Gipps to Lord Stanley, 11 December 1844 in Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vol. XXlV, 126-7 quoted in Frank Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia Volume 2 Colonial Australia 1841-1874 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1980), 79. 210 Deniehy would refer to Sydney’s ‘troops of weary pilgrims from foreign despotism’, whom he called ‘God’s aristocracy’. David Headon and Elizabeth Perkins, eds., Our First Republicans, Lang, Harpur, Deniehy Selected Writings 1840-1860 (Annandale: The Federation Press, 1998), 129-30.

140 the Scotts and James Mitchell, and their colleagues like G. K. Holden among others, took their non-political role as custodians of civil society and of citizenship formation seriously. If this entailed ensuring ‘appropriate’ behaviours and making clear an individual’s duties and responsibilities both within and beyond the Institute’s walls, their purpose ran deeper than exercising ‘social control’ and consolidating hegemonic influence.211 They were concerned with the tenor of their society. Their direction was part of the social consciousness that swept their time in what became (as Gertrude Himmelfarb describes it) a surrogate religion of ‘dedication to the service of others’.212 The Victorians lived by the moral imperative that it was their duty to do what they could to relieve the conditions of the less fortunate. Across all classes, Victorian purpose was transformation – to enable self-reliance, to create the power of self-help, to bring out their ‘better selves’.213 To Himmelfarb this is the common value that the Victorians shared, across all classes (and Dupree shows this ran through all classes). Moreover, Wach sees the deeper purpose of cultural institutions and elite- sponsored reform organizations as ‘the need to find and express modes of social and cultural self-definition’. In their ‘learned societies’, Mitchell’s family and their associates were directed to a form of stewardship, of a higher order of philanthropy, a higher charity beyond almsgiving, of reconnecting broken social bonds on the basis of a rich intellectual inheritance. Such was the scope of mind and shape of the world that Mitchell inherited.

211 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 57-64. 212 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 51. 213 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 55.

141 Chapter Five Cultural Reflection: The Culture of Giving

The example shown by his family coloured Mitchell’s views about philanthropy. Inherited legacies fostered philanthropic intentions in him. These were sharpened by his personal experience which this chapter outlines. With transformation the motivating principle in Sydney and voluntarism the method employed, self-actualization was a commonly shared aspiration across Sydney’s community. Foremost symbol of this aspiration was parliamentary democracy achieved in New South Wales. Colonial leadership in political representation and the civic sophistication that this represented was strained by tensions sparked by the opening of the University of Sydney. Mitchell saw education become the flashpoint in the building of a civil society. The Victorian era’s belief in education and access to knowledge being the birthright of all was tested as the nature of knowledge, and what was considered ‘useful’, fragmented and frayed notions of a harmonious culture. Moreover, his family’s democratic faith in collective enterprise and his social engagement would be tested by selfish ambition.

5.1 Forces of change: individualism and collectivism

The Depression of the 1840s was a great leveler in New South Wales, after which colonial finance relied less than previously on connections among the elect. Traditional social bonds were unraveling and socio-economic practices were quickly diversifying. The passing of the Joint Stock Companies Act (1844) in Britain expanded access to the incorporation of joint-stock companies and the subsequent introduction of the Limited Liability Act (1855). The Joint Stock Companies Act (1856) consolidated the method for the registration of a limited liability company and introduced the modern business system. The increasingly egalitarian makeup of Sydney was apparent from residents neighbouring the Mitchell home at number 6 Cumberland Street. Neighbours of the Mitchells were merchants who included Alexander Learmonth, prosperous wine merchant Henry Fisher, importer William Hanburger and sharebroker William Barton, who lived nearby at 5 George Street. These were men of first social rank measured by a social map of Sydney drawn up in 1858 by the young Liverpool-born economist William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) while working as an assayer at the

142 new Sydney Mint.1 Beyond them Cumberland Street neighbours (from George Street to Charlotte Place) were mechanics and skilled artisans (of secondary social rank). They largely practiced occupations listed in Waugh and Cox as stonemason, fishmonger, sail-maker and the like. Jevons described the area as one of the principal residential areas in Sydney for the artisan class. However, many listed in Waugh and Cox showed their occupations as drayman or labourer and came from the lower orders of society.2 The squalor of the surrounding area was inescapable. This area comprised Jevons’ third-class district in his Sydney map, ‘the lowest and least desirable localities.’3 Open sewage and small hovels, where privacy was impossible, made the lower part of the ‘The Rocks’ area a retreat for filth and vice that Jevons thought was worse than any seen in London, Liverpool or Paris.4 Conditions were worsened by the discovery of gold in New South Wales in February 1851, which had an electrifying effect on the colony. By early May commodities were scarce, prices rose and feverish speculative activity was widespread. Sydney, once a penal outpost manned by troopers and run by military rule, became a hectic port. Ships competed to arrive faster with shorter sailing times to offload their cargoes of people and merchandise, all in high demand in the colony. Anchored off Bradley’s Head while awaiting quarantine clearance, new arrivals could see Sydney Cove, flanked with merchant’s bond stores, charged with energy. Living above this activity, Mitchell observed the congestion below. His home on the crest of Cumberland Street (at the location of today’s southern pylon for the Sydney Harbour Bridge) gave him a commanding view of the harbour.5 He was familiar with the sight of immigrants being ferried to Sydney Cove. He followed Sydney’s growth as it expanded from the foreshore wharves, with buildings increasing in density around Sydney Cove and portico-fronted, four-storeyed terraces rising in series along Macquarie Street. One of his favourite authors, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, encouraged viewing every aspect (whether hillock of earth or fragment of stone or paper) ‘with an eye of

1 Jevons, ‘Social Map’. ‘The Social Cesspools of Sydney, No. 1 The Rocks’, SMH October 7,1858, 2 2 Waugh & Cox, Directory, 20; Jevons, ‘Social Map’, 2. 3 Jevons, ‘Social Map’, 1-3. 4 Jevons, ‘Social Map’, 22. 5 Edwin Dalton, Glass stereograph photographs of Sydney, 1859, ML ON235.

143 no ordinary interest’.6 The explorer Ludwig Leichardt, who had been considered as a tutor when Mitchell was younger, noted his keen eye. Because Mitchell was particularly observant Leichardt considered that he had the making of a naturalist. Dibdin recommended that youths be inculcated in the study of ‘national antiquities’. While Dibdin’s instruction was directed to the aesthetic of a collector, his emphasis on antiquities and history is interesting in light of Mitchell’s later interests. Dibdin encouraged study of place (an emphasis that should be considered in light of Leichhardt’s impression of the watchful young Mitchell). Dibdin said about the study of place,

I hold this to be a species of Patriotism in its way. Anything and everything that recalls to us the past periods of our country…is of immediate and direct use, by teaching us to weigh, and to estimate accordingly, the present positive blessings which we enjoy. And as we are careful of the past, so may we be attentive to the future. Not a coin, not a gem – not an inscription upon a stone tablet, however time-eaten – not a frieze, not a capital, not a pedestal, in the architectural pile –will then be contemplated with indifference: and with this, a most zealous attachment to those Written Records by which a true knowledge of history is mainly upheld. Thus a new sense, as well as a fresh impetus, is given to the human understanding; making all the difference between the vacant gaze of an ordinary traveller, and the intelligent remarks of an instructed observer.7

Dibdin’s enthusiasm for liberal knowledge matched Australian conditions, where much that was novel preoccupied Mitchell’s family. Prospects of industrial development were one example. As early as 1826, the Sydney Monitor described the existence of immense beds of carbon in Newcastle that were thought to be valuable.

6 Dibdin attributed his ‘fixed passion for Bibliophilism’ to Dr Jenner, close friend of Helenus Scott and an enthusiastic bibliophile. They bought books together at Worcester. E. J. O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliographer & Bibliomaniac Extraordinary 1776-1847 (Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1967), 12. 7 Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliophobia, Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade in a Letter Addressed to the Author of Bibliomania by Mercurius Rusticus (London: Henry Bohn, 1832), 85 (DSM/010/D).

144 As the paper put it, most were so beset with opportunities of acquiring wealth that they overlooked this source that matched a gold mine.8 James Mitchell, with background from the coal-bearing fields of Fife (where coal was dug for 600 years), and knowledge of chemistry (a tool to progressive production methods), appreciated this potential from his first introduction to Newcastle in 1822; he spearheaded the development of mining there. Facing the new economy of the 1850s he anticipated recovering his losses from the previous decade with coal. His involvement with manufacturing interests (which included the production of tweed and salt) led him to expect an increased demand for coal. Moreover, sudden demand arose from America to supply the Pacific Steam Trade.9 To meet this, he established the Newcastle Coal and Copper Company, which in mid-July 1851, succeeded in building a tram road in Newcastle, to directly convey coal to the coal chutes on the Newcastle waterfront and the coastal wharf for shipment.10 In all probability, James knew that Newcastle coal gave the first return ever made from New South Wales.11 Gold was the colony’s principal export in 1851, but he respected the potential for wealth which coal offered. However, like with the family’s other endeavours, establishing productivity proved elusive and the wealth he dreamed of was not to come until after his death.12 Anxiety over the turmoil that gold might bring proved justified. Colonial order was unsettled by the influx of new arrivals, who more than doubled its population in under twenty years (from 220,474 in 1848 to more than 447,620 by 1866). The question of parliamentary reform had taken a firm hold of the public mind in England from the beginning of 1831, and emigrants to Australia arrived flush with claims for

…the birthright of our sires! And thus we raise from sea to sea

8 The Monitor, Vol. 1 No. 7, June 30, 1826, 50, (DSM/Fo79.9441/3). 9 Grace Hendy-Pooley, 13, ML MS1261/1. California and the East took the bulk of the surplus production of coal. 10 James Mitchell Papers, being mainly correspondence received c.1824-1869, Mitchell’s Tram Road Act July 24, 1851, ML A2026. 11 Governor King informed Sir Joseph Banks in 1801 that the first cargo of coals brought from the Coal River to Sydney in a Government vessel yielded a profit that he believed was the first return ever made from New South Wales. Governor King to Sir Joseph Banks (Banks Papers), H.R.N.S.W., Vol. IV, 359. 12 Strikes and industrial troubles plagued industrial development in the 1850s. Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 64.

145 Our sacred watchword, Liberty !13

Men across classes, rising to position, demanded a say in the colony’s affairs. A different collectivism entered the colony’s new parliament which had to embrace widened social ranks. This tested the social hierarchy and class distinctions that had previously ordered colonial society. The increased number of working class immigrants from Britain’s crowded industrial centres who reached Sydney on assisted passage arrived without the esprit de corps shared among Wellington’s military veterans who made up many of the free settlers of the 1820s. Democratic fever tested social relations and required the building of a common culture in the Colony. A sense of building this common culture coalesced over the issue of transportation. Colonists regarded Britain’s policy of transportation as ruinous. Resolving to see transportation ended, the Australasian League was inaugurated in 1851. Gathering at the Queen’s Theatre in Melbourne colonists argued that transportation threatened their honour, safety and freedom. They argued that transportation collected together the idle and incorrigible and so encouraged crime. They quoted Richard Cobden who, two years earlier at Leeds, said he thought the colonists ‘would be unworthy of the name of Englishmen if they did not stand up against their country being made the cesspool of our convict population.’14 Unity among colonists firmed. Britain’s penal system, they said, was unequal in its operation, did not reform offenders, and was polluted to the very core. It radically harmed ‘the young and interesting societies rising up in the southern hemisphere.’15 By now, the social composition of colonists and their nation-building purpose were better appreciated. Those living in the colonies for thirty years or more believed that the colonies were made up of ‘wise, earnest, patriotic men’ who ‘wish to bequeath to their children a country.’16 Therefore, they saw the colonies as pledged ‘each to the other, by their mutual interests – their future destinies’. The sovereignty of Great Britain could not compensate for the stigma of its brand. Convictism was a crime committed against society. Discovery of gold in 1851 meant that convictism

13 Constance Hill, Frederic Hill: An Autobiography of Fifty Years in Times of Reform (London: R. Bentley and son, 1893), 86. 14 Australasian League, The League Tracts (Hobart: Australasian League, 1851) (DSM/365/A). 15 Australasian League, The inauguration of the Australasian League: held at the Queen’s Theatre, Melbourne, on February 1st, 1851 (Melbourne: S. Goode, c.1851), 12 (DSM/042/P56). A delegate was William Westgarth, M.L.C, for Melbourne, a close friend of James Mitchell. 16 Australasian League, League Tracts, 10.

146 was in vain. Colonists foresaw that Australian gold would generate population and trade. They foresaw that ‘hundreds of thousands will land on these shores; and what neither the government nor the colonists could have accomplished will be done as by enchantment.’ They read emigration as a branch of Britain’s national economy; a married couple could be assisted to Australia from London for less than the cost of transporting a single convict from Newgate to Hobart. Past history showed them examples when before ‘individuals have been demoralized and destroyed; but countries have been peoples, cities built, and nations born.’17 They believed that history was on their side. Trade imbalances, the difficulty of regular and rapid communication, and historical ties partly added to the simmering tension in the burgeoning Australian colonies. Britain was reluctant (following lessened interest in African colonies after the prohibition of the slave trade) to forego wealth from New South Wales yet appreciated the administrative difficulties of maintaining rule there, struggling as it was domestically with demand for reform. New South Wales always differed from other British colonies. There was a moral tone to its founding with convicts being charged with the idea of self-improvement. Less regard existed there for the Colonial Office than the Colonial Office may have liked. Colonists were truculent about what they saw as Britain’s mishandling of their affairs and its lumbrous responses to their agitation over the issue of transportation. ‘It has been the fate of the Australian colonies’, said Sydney solicitor (and close Mitchell family friend) James Norton in 1853, ‘from the time of their foundation to be the sport of British imbecility and misrule. But for this they might now have been in a high state of civilization and refinement and their condition and government in every respect on a level with those of the nation which founded them.’18 Self-made colonists saw little purpose in regulatory and governmental controls. They thought these obstructed their progress and they disliked them. Some had left Britain and settled in New South Wales out of their resistance to the absolutism of the late Georgian era. Democratic fever stressed relations further. Ambivalence toward Britain was peppered in New South Wales by Chartism, which added to colonial restiveness toward self-rule.

17 Australasian League, League Tracts, No.3, July 1851; ‘Hudson’s bay as a Penal Settlement’, Times, 29 December 1856, 9. 18 James Norton, Port Jackson and the City of Sydney, and other essays (Sydney, 1853), 132 (DSM/308/PA9).

147

5.2 Building a common culture Mitchell’s intellectual development occurred alongside these issues and the growing pains of New South Wales’s emergent democracy. Agitation for legislative reform for many years before culminated in the first parliament under responsible government meeting in May 1853 over the Bill for a new constitution. The 1853 Constitution Act was passed sixty-seven years after first settlement; New South Wales achieved responsible government, manhood suffrage, and vote by ballot. The Imperial Statute that gave the New South Wales constitution the force of law introduced responsible government in 1855. Expanded electoral participation followed. The percentage of adult males possessing the vote gradually increased from 34% in 1850 to 95% by 1856. Assuming statehood was a matter of great pride. As this coincided with gold-rush excitement, New South Wales and the Australian continent were seen as a great South Land of future promise. A new society and new institutions could arise there where ‘peaceful lovers of commerce may, far from the noise of war and the concussion of revolutionary movements, pursue their humanising avocations, and aid in erecting the social fabric where but yesterday there was nought to be gazed upon but a vast and unproductive wilderness’.19 Gold prompted the belief that Australia was destined to be the theatre of important events in the future. Colonists called for new political, commercial, beneficent, and cultural systems that would fit this belief. These sentiments were apparent to Mitchell, whose father was a non-elective member of the first legislative council of 1855-56. Mitchell turned twenty when his father was re-appointed again to the Legislative Council in the first appointments under the Constitution Act. James Mitchell remained there until given a life appointment in mid-1861. Sitting with him in the Legislative Council was his brother- in-law Walker Scott who served as a member in the Legislative Assembly from 1856 to 1861, when he too received a life appointment.20 Many family friends were in the

19 John Lothrop Motley, Democracy the Climax of Political Progress and the Destiny of Advanced Races: An Historical Essay (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1869) (DSM/042/P23). 20 As the Member for Northumberland and Hunter, A. W. Scott became Land Titles Commissioner in 1866, but that year he was bankrupted. He then devoted his energies to his scientific interests. He was a founding member of the Entomological Society of New South Wales (1862), became President (1866) and from 1868 published many papers on entomology. He became a Member of Royal Society of New South Wales (1876), and was a Trustee of the Australian Museum (1862-1879).

148 Assembly also, like Francis Merewether (who was Clerk of the Council). This was the case in Victoria too, which became an independent colony separated from New South Wales from July 1851. Mitchell’s uncle, George Rusden, was Clerk of the Executive Council from 1852 and of the Legislative Council from 1856. John Young (later Baron Lisgar when raised to the peerage in 1870), the twelfth governor of New South Wales (1861-1867), a moderate ‘Peelite’ reformer who enjoyed Gladstone’s favour, was Mitchell’s first cousin. Individualism that prevailed among new arrivals, provoked by gold-rush conditions, affected the social fabric of Sydney. Individualism blurred the communitarian spirit shared by longer-established residents, like Mitchell’s father and his colleagues within the Hunter Region who pulled through the hardships of earlier decades. A lawless, nomadic or wandering caste, emerged from the new arrivals who were disembarking in Sydney in droves in the rush to become rich. Gold rush mobility saw the increase of people with multiple identities. Men abandoned their families for the diggings, leaving women and children to fend for themselves. Issues of law and order became critical, as did the shortage of labour.21

5.3 Common culture of learning Against this background, Mitchell when aged 16 was one of six matriculants who were the first students of the University of Sydney.22 Debate that centred on the University took on a political complexion with the widening franchise and a pressing labour shortage in New South Wales. This debate, expressed during the years into Mitchell’s early twenties, would colour his views. Teaching began in the buildings of the former Sydney College at College Street, Hyde Park after the University was inaugurated there on 11 October 1852. The inaugural ceremony was a grand formal affair held before a crowded assembly. First occasions such as this were impressive. Features of the expansionary age – parliamentary democracy, steam mails, railways, a university – bolstered pride in

21 E. W. Rudder, Incidents Connected with the Discovery of Gold in New South Wales in the year 1851, being a Personal Narrative of His Connection with that Event. (Sydney: Frederick White, 1861) (DSM/042/P6). 22 CUS, 1853; SMH, October 12, 1852, 2-3; H. E. Barff, A Short Historical Account of the University of Sydney, in Connection with the Jubilee Celebrations 1852-1902 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1902), 3-29.

149 colonial progress. The impressiveness could not have escaped Mitchell given his family’s involvement in these developments. Walker Scott was a partner in the steamship plying between Sydney and Newcastle, and actively advocated railway construction as a shareholder in the Hunter River Railway Company. The University, and the training it would provide, were linked to future progress and prosperity. Francis Merewether’s far-reaching vision to build the University on high ground in Grose Farm (on the south-west of the city’s edge), earned him the sobriquet ‘Futurity’. By now acting Colonial Treasurer, Merewether was convinced that the University Senate should direct its attention beyond present requirements to preparations for a great future. His doctrine expressed this ambition: Magnis magna para (‘Great among the great’). Indeed, Merewether thought the University was established ‘somewhat in advance of a practical need of it.’23 The University’s Chancellor Sir Charles Nicholson stressed the University’s role in providing higher means of instruction ‘by which men may be fitted to discharge the duties and offices belonging to the higher grades in society; to enable her citizens to become enlightened statesmen, useful magistrates, learned and able lawyers, judicious physicians.’24 Nicholson reminded the new scholars that they were seen as future leaders, who would be called upon to exercise these duties. They were the writers of Australia’s future history.25 The University sought to follow the Oxbridge model, as its motto implied: Sidere mens eadem mutato (‘the same spirit under different skies’). Gothic buildings and ceremonial conducted in Latin fed disquiet about a ‘gentleman’s university’ among those who considered that education should address more immediate colonial needs. In the community, it was increasingly felt that Nicholson’s model for a university was too impractical and undemocratic. Education should provide skills that the shortage of skilled labour required, not ‘aristocratic learning …and antiquated absurdities.’26 Confining the University’s choice of professors to members of Oxford or Cambridge spurred further resentment when the university’s parliamentary charter

23 F. L. S. Merewether, University of Sydney Reminiscences (Printed for private distribution 1898), 3. 24 CUS, 1852, 40; They were already privileged given the few numbers of children in the colony who were receiving formal schooling. Most were unschooled and few were sufficiently educated to qualify for matriculation. Burns, Secondary Education, 1: 9, 13. 25 CUS, 1852, 42. 26 ‘The Opening of the University’, Empire, October 13, 1852, 2.

150 established ‘that no sect in New South Wales has a right of preference to another in regard to any civil advantages’.27 Furthermore, the university required that students should ‘produce certificates from the religious teachers of their several denominations before they can compete for honours or degrees’. This compelled students to belong to some sect or other, violating the charter declaring otherwise. This fuelled concerns that recently gained democratic liberties (like male suffrage) may be lost. The University was seen as serving conservative interests at the risk of democratic liberty. Reformist liberals regretted that the University ‘has not conformed to the best models in its foundation’.28 Moore’s directory for 1852 recommended that this error be corrected at once. At this time, calls for universal education were heard both in Australia and in Britain. As Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man (1792), ‘A nation under a well regulated government should permit none to remain uninstructed.’ English poet Richard Hengist ‘Orion’ Horne (1802-1884), in The Dreamer and the Worker (1851), stressed that national education must be absolutely enforced ‘from our rulers by every legitimate means in our poor’.29 Speaking for many in the colony, Horne disagreed with conservative opinion that democracies were flawed, easily swayed by demagogues and destabilising to laws. Echoing Christian Socialist sentiments, Horne argued that society needed to reclaim her outcasts. Practical men were needed rather than classical scholars; far from ‘politics’ being forbidden within the walls of universities, it should form one express department for special teaching and study. Reading and education were seen to benefit social order and therefore bring prosperity. Because reading and education were seen to elevate individuals morally and intellectually (and so, economically), liberals stressed the importance of reading toward self-improvement and lasting social benefit. Civic progress required education. Chartism introduced the voice of self-possession in abundant books that extolled the virtues of self-help, and offered encouragement and example. The foremost example of the literature of ‘how-to-get-ahead’ was Scottish-born author

27 J. Moore, Moore’s Almanac and Hand Book for New South Wales (Sydney: J. Moore, 1852), 31. 28 Moore, Almanac, 31. 29 Richard Hengist Horne, The Dreamer and the Worker, A Story of the Present Time (London: Henry Colburn, 1851), Vol. 2, 292 (DSM/823.89/H).

151 Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self Help (1859).30 Smiles believed in the perfectibility of mankind by harnessing technological advances; his enormously influential title stamped the value system and moral orientation of the Victorian era. A notable exemplar in Britain of Smiles’ gospel and an apostle of the principle of self-help was the Northamptonshire staymaker John Plummer whose work was in Edward Wise’s library. Plummer’s Poems, Essays and Sketches (1854) became celebrated and elevated him to journalism. This would eventually bring him to New South Wales where he would settle in Sydney and come to know Mitchell. At the completion of the University’s first academic year in 1853, Mitchell received prizes in chemistry, and was awarded the Barker Scholarship for proficiency in mathematics and experimental physics (1853-4).31 Interestingly, this prize was the first privately endowed scholarship offered to students. Not long after, in February 1856, upon passing examination in Classics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Natural Philosophy and Logic, he became one of seven (and among the first) undergraduates to be conferred with the degree of Bachelor of Arts.32 The degree of Master of Arts was granted after six terms if a candidate remained on the books of the University, paid yearly fees of two guineas, and passed nominal examinations. He was granted an M.A. in 1859. Candidates alongside Mitchell included Marshall Burdekin (1837- 1886), Joseph Leary (1831-1881), the civic-minded Alexander Oliver (1832-1904), and William Charles Windeyer (1834-1897). When Bertram Stevens wrote about Mitchell in 1919, he observed that Mitchell had told one of William Dymock’s assistants that he wrote a magazine article in his undergraduate days.33 Students edited and wrote for The Sydney University Magazine, a short-lived quarterly initiated in January 1855 which published prize-winning poems and essays. If Mitchell’s article was published within the magazine it was released anonymously as nothing in it bears his name. Over its 120 pages, the magazine aimed to feature criticism of contemporaneous European literature, in order to cultivate independent and profound reflection and to develop

30 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London: Murray, 1859). 31 CUS, 1854, 44, 48. 32 ‘Newly created Bachelors of Arts, William Charles Windeyer, Marshall Burdekin, William Cyprian Curtis, Robert Marsden Fitzgerald, Edward Lee, David Scott Mitchell, Robert Spier Willis.’, Hobart Courier, February 26, 1856.; For details of the first students see Dr Peter Chippendale, ‘Glimpses of the early University, Part 1 The First Matriculants.’ Record, 2005, 7-9. http://www.usyd.edu.au/arms/archives/Record_2005.pdf (accessed April 2, 2009). 33 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 25.

152 ‘latent germs of talent and genius’. The magazine remains important for what it shows us about the sentiment that the university’s students expressed. Undergraduate enthusiasm rode over editorial restraint when promoting the magazine. Still, the gist of what was expressed is worth noting, particularly as this notice was widely circulated in Waugh & Cox’s indispensible directory. They faced brighter prospects:

We are ceasing to be a mere factory – the greed of gold is giving way to a purer ambition; without ceasing to be Britons we are learning to be proud of the name of Australians; and many amongst us are hoping to testify to their love for our glorious fatherland, not by indolent enjoyment of their gains amidst the luxuries of European civilization, but by proving themselves worthy descendents of those who laid the foundation of the English Constitution in the wild forests of the farthest west.34

The leaders of the future, while being encouraged to study the Ancients (from Greece and Rome), held visions beyond the past. If being encouraged to look beyond the desires for quick wealth that were so pronounced around them, theirs was a generation fixed on the future. Commentators in 1851, like Aberdeenshire-born journalist William Augustine Duncan (1811-1885), considered that conditions in New South Wales emphasised the great destiny that colonists anticipated for it.35 Duncan noted that, by 1851, scarcely a trace remained of the colony’s first origin, it was so fixed on advancement. Fittingly, the University’s prize poem, delivered at the first use of the University’s Great Hall in July 1859, was titled Captain Cook meditating on Australia’s Future.36 To those who asked, the question facing them was what kind of future would this be? What shape would this future take? Evidence that these questions absorbed David’s attention comes from titles which he owned from this date, besides those in his family’s library. Among his

34 Waugh and Cox, 265. 35 William Augustine Duncan, Notes of a Ten Year Residence in New South Wales, Extract from Hogg’s Instructor, 129-150. (DSM/Q991/D). 36 W. H. H. Yarrington, “Captain Cook Meditating on Australia’s Future”, delivered at the opening of the Great Hall of the Sydney University, July 18th, 1859 (Sydney: A. C. World, 1916); University Prize Poem: Gold Medal “Captain Cook Meditating on Australia’s Future” (Sydney: Samuel E. Lees, Printer, 1872) (DSM/042/P260).

153 mother’s books was Sir William Drummond’s speculative Origines; or, remarks on the origin of several empires, states, and cities (1824-29).37 Letters from the time tell us that she lent her books, which suggests she also discussed them. Drummond was a cosmopolitan Orientalist who fell within the European sceptical tradition with the likes of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.38 Political libertarianism and sceptical idealism ran through his consistently radical critiques that praised democracy and were sceptical about religious matters.39 Writing to Leigh Hunt, Shelley called Drummond ‘the most acute metaphysical critic of the age’. With this background, Mitchell’s views were anchored in a big picture of society.

5.4 Public Duty, Useful Knowledge and Mechanics’ Institutes Across town the Sydney School of Arts was highly popular in this age of useful knowledge. Because they democratically offered training in ‘useful skills’, Mechanics’ Institutes like the School of Arts were regarded as ‘universities for the people’. Initially formed in Scotland, Mechanics’ Institutes met the interest in self- improvement which manufacturing workers, or mechanics, were seeking.40 Heroes of the manufacturing economy of the mid-nineteenth century were self-confident mechanics (machine ‘operatives’) like James Watt, who without formal education

37 Sir William Drummond, Origines; or, Remarks on the Origin of Several Empires, States, and Cities (London: Printed by A. J. Valpy, 1824-1829) (DSM/913/D). Muriel E. Chamberlain, ‘Drummond, Sir William, of Logiealmond (c.1770–1828)’, ODNB, online edition (January 2006) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8088 (accessed 14 July 2009). Education, particularly better education for women, was of prime concern to Sarah Scott (from the circle of bluestocking writers whom Mitchell’s grandmother knew in her early years). In The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), Sarah Scott questioned what would become of class distinction if all were educated, even if only according to class. 38 Jalal Uddin Khan, ‘Shelley’s Orientalia: Indian Elements in his Poetry’, Atlantis -Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.1 (June 2008): 44. Drummond questioned the chronological and spiritual priority of the Bible by often maintaining a polytheistic account of cultural and religious origins. Persian, Hindu and Chinese references in his writing show his cosmopolitanism and that of his readers. Freethinkers drew on Drummond’s scholarship: James A. Epstein, Radical Expression, Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 138. 39 Terence Allan Hoagwood, introd., Academical questions (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints (1805)/1984), iv, xi. 40 The term ‘mechanic’ was commonly used in Britain in the early days of the industrial revolution to refer to the rural craftsmen or workers who moved into the factories to work on the new machines without being highly classed. In 1799 George Birkbeck (1776-1841), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, gave free lectures to working class people of the city. The Edinburgh Mechanics’ Institute was established in 1819. Birkbeck inaugurated the London Mechanics’ Institution in 1823, and one followed in Manchester in 1824. Bronwyn Lowden, Mechanics’ Institutes, Schools of Arts, Athenaeums, etc.: An Australian Checklist, 2nd edition (Donvale, Vic: Lowden Publishing, 2007), 1.; Thomas Kelly, ‘The Origin of Mechanics’ Institutes, British Journal of Educational Studies 1, no. 1 (1952): 17-27.

154 achieved significant technical innovations.41 Workers wanted education in political economy and philosophy, as well as practical subjects like geometry that could be useful in the free economy. Call for public education, advocated by Richard Cobden and John Bright, accompanied Chartist agitation. By 1851 there were 702 Institutes in England alone, each with its library.42 Proportionally more Mechanics Institutes mushroomed in Australia than elsewhere in the world: Peter Biskup estimated there were about 1000 across the continent, ‘nearly half of them established after 1875’, mostly with a membership ‘ranging from 100 to 200 and…fewer than 1000 books.’43 He called the institutes Australia’s first civic centres.44 John Woolley, the recently arrived Principal and Professor of Classics of the University, supported Sydney’s School of Arts.45 Then aged 36, English-born Woolley was a liberal minded scholar. A physician’s son, Woolley was educated at Oxford’s Exeter College before earning his Doctorate of Civil Law in 1844. A Fellow of University College, he believed in the classical arts curriculum. He was also sympathetic to Christian Socialist philosophy and began regular courses of study on political economy and constitutional history at the School of Arts. He frequently lectured there, and also served as the Institute’s Vice President, then President. His involvement greatly boosted support for the School’s 1854 winter campaign when democratic fever sparked renewed enthusiasm for what the School of Arts offered. Picking up on this and on Samuel Smiles and his literature of self-advancement,

41 Watt’s steam engine (1775), Crompton’s ‘Mule Jenny’ (1779) and Cartwright’s power-driven loom (1786) drove industrial enterprise. 42 J. E. Traue, ‘The Public Library Explosion in Colonial New Zealand’, Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 2, (2007): 158; For the relationship between a scientific education and the socio- political purpose of Mechanical Institutes, see Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes, Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 31-74. 43 Peter Biskup with the assistance of Doreen M. Goodman, Libraries in Australia, (Wagga Wagga, N.S.W.: Centre for Information Studies, 1994), 3. Biskup notes that most of their libraries ended in the depression of the 1890s: 4. Lowden, Mechanics’ Institutes, 1; Barbara Heaton, Greg Preston & Mary Rabbit, Science, Success and Soirees: The Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Newcastle and the Lower Hunter (Newcastle: Newcastle Region Library, 1997), 27. 44 Biskup, Libraries, 4. 45 John Woolley, Two Lectures Delivered at the School of Arts, Sydney (Sydney: Joseph Cook, 1855) (DSM/042/P87); John Woolley, The Social Uses of Schools of Art: A Lecture delivered in the Mechanics’ Obituary, SMH, January 9, 1913. School of Arts, Sydney, at the Commencement of the Lecture Season, May 1st, 1860 (Sydney: Mechanics School of Arts Committee, 1860) (DSM/374/W). Woolley’s lectures also appeared in the press, ‘Dr. Woolley’s Lecture at the School of Arts’, SMH, October 28, 1863, 4. At this, he lectured on J. S. Mill’s definition of liberty. For Woolley’s work at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts see Clifford Turney, ed., Pioneers of Australian Education (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969), 1: 102-4.

155 Moore’s Almanac that year trumpeted notices about self-raised men.46 Where John Grylls impressed David with the importance of democratic learning, John Woolley reinforced this view. Woolley’s mid-year lecture was printed by the Empire. Woolley told his audience: ‘Education is enfranchisement; to educate is to deliver from the bondage of the penal statute; to enthrone the enlightened reason and purified will on the seat of judgement: to emancipate us from the fear of the magistrate that we may become masters of ourselves.’47 A social theorist, Woolley insinuated liberal views in his lectures at the University on Aristotle, Athenian democracy and the city-state of Athens.48 His students read the new twelve-volume history of Greece, written by the leading English radical George Grote (and to whom Augusta Scott, Mitchell’s grandmother had been connected). Grote argued against the anti-democratic view of the Athenian state, as portrayed and criticised by Aristotle and Xenophon, and as held by conservatives who saw democracies as flawed, easily swayed by demagogues and destabilising to laws.49 Woolley was a practical educator who believed education should serve social amelioration. He viewed the purpose of the School of Arts was to serve those who missed out on an education. Educational opportunity should be for all because this would be for common good; it would benefit the colony. By providing education, employment opportunities were extended to the humbler classes; this would benefit the economy at large and hence society. Woolley emphasised the importance of reading, particularly for young men, because reading created employment for them. He stressed the importance of History and Geography ‘to promote the social amelioration of those classes which form, so to speak, the bones and sinews of our

46 J. Moore, Moore’s Almanac and Hand book for New South Wales (Sydney: J. Moore, 1854), 113- 6. Smiles believed in the perfectibility of mankind through progress. See Adrian Jarvis, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values (Stroud, GL: Sutton Publishing Limited), 147. It noted that the father of the modern industrial factory system, Richard Arkwright was almost without education. Held up among examples of men who surmounted impediments and owed their success to self- education were chemist Sir Humphry Davy; cartographer and explorer Carsten Niebuhr; statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin; Louis XIV’s financier, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; American merchant John Jacob Astor; and even William Shakespeare. 47 ‘Intellectual Culture’, Empire, June 19, 1854, 6. 48 John Hirst has pointed out Woolley’s liberal views: John B. Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848-1884 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 184. 49 George Grote, History of Greece (London: John Murray, 1854-1857) (DSM/938/G); ‘Institutions of Ancient Greece’, Westminster Review, April 10, 1826, 260-331. Perhaps too David noted Grote’s passion for rigorous examination of evidence. It was Grote’s view that only evidence separated and verified history from myth. See Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘George Grote and the Study of Greek History’, in A. D. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, eds. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 15-31.

156 national frame’.50 Woolley’s rhetoric was addressed to a democratic society of equals empowered by knowledge. The Library of the Sydney School of Arts aimed to be ‘the most comfortable reading room in Sydney’.51 While it contained a selection of scientific works, and invited the Members to tread “the higher walks of Literature”, it was more popular for offering from its 5,700 volumes a mixed assortment of works of fiction.52 Its importance to writers, however, was made clear when in 1857 poet Henry Kendall (1839-1882) could not afford the 5d per quarter subscription to the Institute. Barred from its reading room, he vainly searched the bookshops for a particular quarterly magazine which he had intended to read at the Institute’s library. Woolley enjoyed Kendall’s company; he gave him lessons in French and Latin, and use of the library of the University.53 Institute Members came from every background, many intent on attaining the goal of self-education. Mitchell participated in the debating class (called Mutual Instruction) at the Institute, alongside William Bede Dalley (1831-1888), a convict’s son and future statesman and with whom Mitchell formed a close friendship.54 Another convict’s son whom Mitchell could not have escaped knowing was Daniel Deniehy (1828-1865). Just eight years older than Mitchell, Deniehy was a native-born lawyer, practicing as an attorney and solicitor.55 Through 1851, 23-year old Deniehy was articled to solicitor Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse. Deniehy and Stenhouse remained close from then, with Deniehy writing that he turns to Stenhouse ‘as I would do to my father’.56 Stenhouse was on the committee of the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (1855-1863) and later its Senior Vice-President (1863- 1867) and President (1867-1873). A writer himself, Stenhouse when an Edinburgh lawyer, published critical essays in Scottish publications and translated German romantic tales. His large library held sets of the German Romantics (like Schiller).

50 Rev. James B. Laughton, A Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the Bathurst Mechanics; School of Arts (Sydney: Printed by F. Cunninghame, 1855), 18 (DSM/820.8/PA1). 51 Empire, June 19, 1854, 6. 52 Jordens, Stenhouse, 41. In 1854, Deniehy prepared the catalogue for the School of Arts Library of 5,700 volumes. 53 For a general description of the library, SMH, July 13, 1859, 6. 54 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 39. 55 E. A. Martin, The life and speeches of Daniel Henry Deniehy (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1884), 2. 56 Cyril Pearl, Brilliant Dan Deniehy, A Forgotten Genius (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson (Australia), 1972), 18; Prentis, The Scots (1983), 214.

157 Sydney’s littérateurs pivoted around Stenhouse and his library.57 He was also close to the Mitchell family. Mitchell could have attended Deniehy’s lectures delivered in 1855 at the School of Arts on English, French and Italian authors of modern times.58 He certainly would have heard of ‘Brilliant Dan’ (as Deniehy was known), who was an avid book collector.59 He later told Bertram Stevens that Deniehy was the greatest orator Australia had ever known.60 Deniehy’s history offers insights into the world in which Mitchell was living and the options which were open to him. When aged 14, Deniehy spent a year in Europe after failing to gain admission into Cambridge. Travel in Ireland during 1842 stirred in him a deep spirit of colonial patriotism. After his ‘Grand Tour’ absorbing the galleries of Dresden, Munich and the Louvre, he returned to Sydney where he haunted bookstalls and assembled a personal library of some 5,000 volumes.61 This was described twenty years later by lawyer Edward Martin as unequalled, ‘which for numbers, taste, choice, and elegance, no other reader in the Australias has ever approached’.62 To his contemporaries, Deniehy was an erudite litterateur, with knowledge of the most recherché books. He was obsessively well read including in several European languages. Moreover, he was determined to extend his learning still further so that he would be equipped to participate in shaping his native land into a democratic republic. He dreamed of a southern republic free of the evils of the old world.63 The working of Sydney’s new machinery of responsible government was

57 Simon During, ‘Out of England, Literary Subjectivity in the Australian Colonies, 1788-1867’ in Judith Ryan & Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Imagining Australia, Literature and Culture in the New World (Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies), 8. 58 One of a series of lectures on literature that Deniehy gave at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts from 1851: SMH September 9, 1851, 3; SMH, November 30, 1857, 2. 59 Deniehy also prepared the first catalogue for the library of 5700 volumes of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1854: Jordens, Stenhouse, 41. 60 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 46. 61 Deniehy’s library is surveyed by Frances Devlin-Glass, ‘Two and a half tons of books’ Daniel Henry Deniehy’s Library’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 7 (1976), 37–52 reprinted in Stitz, Collectors, 86-94. 62 Martin, Deniehy, 3; Bradley & Newton, Important sale of books: the valuable library of the late D.H. Deniehy, Esq., consisting of rare and choice works in every department of literature to be sold by public auction by Bradley & Newton at their rooms, old Bank of Australasia, 239 George Street on Thursday & Friday July 26 and 27 (Sydney: Bradley & Newton, c.1865). Over 770 items are listed, including items in group lots (like 33 volumes of the Illustrated London News from 1849). Among them were untranslated French, Spanish, Italian, German and Greek classics. 63 Hirst, Democracy, 189; For selected writings of Deniehy see David Headon & Elizabeth Perkins (Eds.), Our First Republicans: John Dunmore Lang, Charles Harpur, Daniel Henry Deniehy: Selected Writings 1840-1860 (Leichardt, N.S.W.: Federation Press, 1998).

158 being anxiously watched. The institution of representative and responsible government in the North American and Australian colonies was hailed among the great achievements of the century by the Times in London. Dispirited by the turbulence and deadlocks in the legislative machinery, Deniehy wrote to friend and artist Adelaide Ironside (1831-1867) in 1856, describing the swarmery of the administration of Charles Cowper (1801-1875), the popular liberal leader of the day (and Premier from 1858).64 It was ‘an Administration that has apparently done its level best since its accession to power to degrade and drag into contempt the great institutions of popular government.’65 Deniehy was elected a member of the Legislative Assembly for the seats of Argyle (1857-59) and East Macquarie (1860). In this arena, Deniehy was viewed as a curiosity (not dissimilar to the way in which the author of Vivian Grey (1853) was looked on after his first entrance into the House of Commons: Benjamin Disraeli was seen as a fantastic literary adventurer, who might find sport in the new field of political life). Deniehy was no politician. He opposed cronyism, withdrew his allegiance to Cowper, and alienated himself from most of those with whom he entered public life. The Times could have had Deniehy in mind when the paper likened the desire in New South Wales for an Opposition in the colony’s Parliament to ‘the first unsteady impetus of an untrained colt, which has boldness, pace, and wind, but wants the art of putting them forth to advantage’.66 Deniehy believed that it was useless endeavouring in parliament to stem the tide of self-interest around him. Looking around him, he saw ‘men of depraved tastes, and profligate habits, struggling for social position against the influences of early poverty and defective education, wealthy self-made men whose minds never once dwelt on the first principles of good government.’67 Deniehy resented the colonial Bar being monopolised by an English-educated elite. Only those already admitted as advocates or barristers in Britain or Ireland were admitted to the colonial Bar. When Englishman, (Sir) Lyttleton Holyoake Bayley

64 Ironside drew a portrait of James Mitchell’s brother-in-law David Scott: Sketch of Capt. D.C.F. Scott, Adelaide Ironside Sketchbook c.1850s, ML PXA1759. Ironside was a close friend of his wife Maria Scott, and frequently sketched the Scott family. Jill Poulton, Adelaide Ironside, The Pilgrim of Art (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1987), 24, 27. 65 Martin, Deniehy, 6. 66 Times, December 1, 1856. 67 Henry Parkes, The Electoral Act and How to Work It: A Series of letters on the Subject of the Approaching Elections (Sydney: Printed for the publisher, Mr. G. T. Thornton by W. C. Belbridge, 1859), 7, 11-13 (DSM/042/P18).

159 (1827-1910), was appointed Attorney-General to the Cowper Administration – after having been only two months in the Colony – Deniehy vented his disdain in How I became Attorney-General of New Barataria (1859).68 Deniehy titled Sydney New Barataria after a fictional isle in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which Sancho Panza was awarded as a prank; the name derives from the Spanish word barato, meaning cheap. Tongue-in-cheek and writing under Holyoake Bayley’s name, Deniehy called himself ‘a little chap in the Assembly’ named Twank, who had been bosom friend and companion to Tiptop. This is clearly William Bede Dalley, close friend of Mitchell against whom he sometimes debated. Cowper is Wriggle the Slippery, Prime Minister at Port Innocence, the chief town of New Barataria. Tiptop (a native-born voice) concludes: ‘We are too young for what is called politics: we have in fact no politics; we don’t want them.’69 Attempting to rebuild his life as a solicitor in Bathurst, Deniehy died broken, a pauper, and prematurely aged man, at 35, in September 1865.70 Deniehy was a man of vivid imagination whose genius (namely his ‘Pen and Ink Cartoons’) was likened to English essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834) whom Mitchell most admired.71 Announcing his death in the Empire, Stenhouse called Deniehy ‘the brightest spirit that has yet moved amongst us’ and Henry Parkes later described Deniehy Whose mind, a meteor to our dazzled sight,

Blazed out, and vanished in the shades of night!72

Stenhouse said Deniehy’s reputation for high intellectual culture and brilliant oratorical powers were qualifications for which there was no steady demand in the Colony. Deniehy had dedicated Barataria to English political journalist and parliamentary sketch writer Edward Michael Whitty (1827-1860), author of Friends of Bohemia (1857). Both were highly critical of their parliaments which they satirized. London-born Whitty covered the British parliamentary sessions from 1846-1849, and

68 SMH, December 31, 1859, 8. 69 Daniel Henry Deniehy, How I became Attorney-General of New Barataria: An Experiment in Treating Facts in the Forms of Fiction (Sydney: Edward Greville, 1860), 23. 70 Martin, Deniehy, 37. 71 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 20. 72 Henry Parkes, Fragmentary Thoughts (Sydney: Samuel E. Lees, 1889), 183 (DSM/C513).

160 printed his observations in the weekly The Leader, which was then an independent voice unlike other papers which were party organs. Whitty’s History of the Session 1852-1853:A Parliamentary Retrospect (1854) was published by John Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review and of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill.73 The gist of Whitty’s thrust is encapsulated by Scottish novelist and journalist James Hannay (1827-1873) (whom Mitchell also read). In the frontispiece to Whitty’s parliamentary account, Hannay praises it: ‘A wag of that period, who was also a screw, once exclaimed while he was eating oysters, “What grand things oysters would be if one could make one’s servants live on the shells.” They achieved that in government; for the parties got the oysters and the people got the shells.’74 Britain’s House of Commons was then unrepresentative and irresponsible. Whitty had little respect for it as it then existed, calling it ‘the best club in London’ with debate fuelled by the decanter.75 Free with criticism and sarcasm, Whitty wrote determined to secure reform and improved parliamentary life. His sarcasm was directed at the short-lived coalition administration of Whigs and Peelites under Lord Aberdeen, which lasted forty-one days during 1852 and 1853. Viewing this as unrepresentative of Britain’s people, Whitty shocked and startled in order to light the way to improvements in the parliamentary system. More, Whitty exposed sham. As he pictured it, swindle occurred everywhere in England ‘and nobody is ashamed of sham’.76 Whitty ended his first volume explaining that his knowledge of sham (shown through the book) was due to his belonging to the society of the Friends of Bohemia: ‘it is our business to collect all such facts, in order to establish arguments for the restoration and independence of Bohemia. Until the delusion of the power of humbug is dissipated, and Bohemia again influences the politics as well as the literature and art of the world, we shall never have a proper state of things’.77 Today a bohemian is thought of as a gipsy of society, who either cuts himself

73 The 1857 edition was re-published: Edward Michael Whitty, St. Stephen’s in the Fifties: The Session 1852-1853: A Parliamentary Retrospect (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906). The Irish nationalist and Liberal historian, novelist and politician Justin McCarthy (1830-1912) wrote the introduction to this edition. Whitty wrote the Parliamentary Summary for the Times (London) from 1846-9, before emigrating to Australia where he died in 1860 aged 33. 74 Edward Michael Whitty, Friends of Bohemia, or, Phases of London Life (London: Smith, Elder, and Co, 1857), 1:frontispiece (quoting from James Hannay’s Satire and Satirists) (DSM/823.89/W). 75 Whitty, St. Stephen’s, xiv 76 Whitty, Bohemia, 1:288-90. 77 Whitty, Bohemia, 1: 293.

161 off, or is by his habits cut off, from society for which he is otherwise fitted. This is especially so in an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life. In the later nineteenth century a bohemian was seen as not particular as to the society he frequents, who despises conventionalities generally. However, there is more to the phrase, which was coined in the fourteenth century in association with the leading heretic of the fifteenth century, religious reformer from Bohemia John Huss (c.1372–1415). A rector of Prague University, Huss attacked ecclesiastical abuses and led an early Protestant group that arose among his followers who were known as the Bohemian Brethren. After Huss's execution the Hussites took up arms and demanded a set of reforms that anticipated the Reformation. In the nineteenth century Huss’s stand against abuse of privilege was highly symbolic. For this reason, as a link to ‘priceless liberty’ besides defence against ‘the influence of miserable sectarianism’, Sydney barrister and politician David Buchanan (1823-1890) cited Huss in the New South Wales parliament when advocating the teaching of history in the Public Schools of New South Wales.78 Huss supported the views of fourteenth century philosopher, theologian, dissident and reformer John Wyclife (c.1328-1384) who criticized the wealth and power of the Church and upheld the Bible as the sole guide for doctrine. Unlike Wycliff, Huss was a moderate, who asserted that moral uprightness is the criterion of legitimate eccleciastical (and so, of public) office.79 Five centuries later, the Christian Socialist Movement adhered to similar views. As did Whitty, who attacked abuses in Parliament and upheld democracy. If, in his idealism, Deniehy believed he could make a difference, this aspiration was destroyed by his parliamentary experience. His regard for the Legislative Assembly evaporated, as had Whitty’s for the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Disillusioned, Deniehy bit at the anomalies of a parliament that to him appeared to obstruct practical good sense, civil equality, and intellectual and political progress.80 A close friend of Mitchell’s at the university was William Charles Windeyer.

78 ‘Parliament of New South Wales’, The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 1 February, 1883, 4. 79 On the importance of Huss see Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1997), 258-262. Buchanan argued in Sydney that Australian children should ‘be made aware of the reasons for the burning of John Huss’ and should also be taught the history of Australia. 80 James Hannay, ‘Bohemians and bohemianism’, Cornhill Magazine, 11 (1865): 241–55. In the heat of reformist agitation, Deniehy attacked former friends, like Whitty did in his novel.

162 Only two years apart in age, both were prize-winners in the second year scholarship examination. Their families shared connections in the Hunter Valley. William was the only child of an English-born barrister whose financial affairs collapsed, and who died young. William was 13 in 1847 when his father died, aged 41, his estate insolvent. William’s grandfather, Charles Windeyer (1780-1855), was Sydney’s first Mayor in 1842. William was destined for public life. At University Windeyer distinguished himself; he was identified as the ‘crack boy’. He was thought ‘clever, very impulsive, original and independent’.81 He demonstrated his political interest in an essay, Athens in the time of Pericles, which was awarded the English essay prize. He later became the first graduate of the university to obtain a seat in the Assembly.82 As Woolley’s students, and with their literary interests, circumstantial evidence points to Mitchell and Windeyer participating in the literary community that existed in the 1850s and 1860s and which centred around the home of Deniehy’s mentor, and Mitchell family friend, Nicol Stenhouse. Writing to his mother in 1852, Windeyer described how influential Woolley could be. Windeyer wrote of Woolley as a splendid man ‘a soul man, a romantic I think, [who] knows the way to sway young people. I talk to him just as if I had known him for years.’83 Windeyer’s letter tells us how impressionable upon young minds Woolley was, as does a poem from Henry Halloran which the Sydney Morning Herald printed when Woolley drowned in 1866. Inscribed to Stenhouse, Halloran referred to how Woolley’s memory would remain with youth ‘now rising up to be among the voices, serene and free’ that, shall lift colonists ‘upwards, till they prize what he desired’.84 Windeyer’s brilliance was widely admired, and it is likely that he was included in the Stenhouse circle as a protégé of the generously-spirited Woolley.85 A letter from Windeyer in 1855 urging his mother that Mitchell must stay with them at Tomago over Christmas tells us that Mitchell spent time with him. The Mitchell family album

81 SG, August 13, 1842, 3.; The Governor Sir George Gipps appointed an interim Council for Sydney awaiting the first Council elections, with Charles Windeyer as Mayor and aldermen for the six wards. Francis Merewether was one of the aldermen appointed with Windeyer. 82 Windeyer graduated (B.A. 1856, M.A. 1859) and was admitted to the Colonial Bar (1857). He was Esquire Bedell in the University (1855-56), a member of the Senate (1866-97), Vice-Chancellor (1883- 86) and Chancellor (1895-96). 83 William Charles Windeyer, November 2, 1852, Sydney University Archives P1/10/20. 84 ‘Dr. John Woolley’, SMH, March 17, 1866, 7. 85 Woolley’s direct influence on Windeyer’s later dedication to developing educational opportunities is covered by Burns, Secondary Education, 2:310.

163 contains a photograph of Stenhouse inserted among those of Mitchell and Scott family members.86 Stenhouse was a trustee of the Subscription Library, renamed the Australian Library and Literary Institution in 1851, and over which James Mitchell presided. Like James, Stenhouse was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he took his M.A. in 1825. When a legal clerk in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, he rubbed shoulders with the great literary and philosophical figures then there. He was clerk to Scottish metaphysician Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), who, as Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh, had taught the hapless but eclectic journalist and poet Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). In the 1830s Stenhouse was legal adviser and friend to the improvident de Quincey, after whom Stenhouse later named his son. Stenhouse knew Scottish author Robert Chambers (1802-1871) (whose Chambers's Encyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge for the People was issued from 1860 for the common reader). Stenhouse keenly studied and translated German literature (besides reading Latin, Italian, Greek, and Spanish); and had a sound knowledge of the classics. Reaching Sydney he was admitted there as a solicitor in 1840 and practiced with solicitor William Hardy until just before his death in 1873. He accumulated a personal library in Sydney of classical and religious, English and continental literature, which he lent freely. His library of more than 4,000 volumes was considered the finest and most accessible in Sydney for about thirty years.87 The range of books he owned demonstrated his wide range of reading and literary tastes. Stenhouse was committed to cultural life. To him, the proper fostering of intellectual pursuits was vital to forging a civil society. He supported and encouraged local expression while remaining rooted in European culture. He was not a wealthy man but encouraged and supported young writers. Australian writers saw Stenhouse as their living link to British and European writing. Colonial writers and intellectuals in the 1850s and 1860s gathered around Stenhouse at his home, Waterview House in Caroline Street, Balmain. Among those who could be found there were Professors

86 Album of photographs of family and friends, ca. 1863-1892 (possibly compiled by David Scott Mitchell) ML PXC 831, 122; Mitchell also owned papers belonging to Stenhouse: Stenhouse and Hardy Papers ML *D 80-*D 81. 87 For details of the Stenhouse Library see Jordens, Stenhouse, 116-139; Ann-Mari Jordens, ‘Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse’, Australian Dictionary of Biography online http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A060201b.htm?hilite=stenhouse (accessed 4 February 2009); Pearl, Deniehy, 7.

164 Woolley and Charles Badham (who succeeded Woolley at the University), poets Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall, politicians William Bede Dalley and Henry Parkes, besides other writers like Henry Halloran and Frank Fowler and many who wrote in Deniehy’s Southern Cross journal. Clearly, Mitchell was acquainted with Stenhouse. A copy of William Tenant’s The Thane of Fife (1822) bears the signatures of Stenhouse’s wife, Margaretta, and that of Hamilton Collins Sempill, the Deniehys – and David Mitchell.88 The personal influence that Stenhouse had on Mitchell is not clear, but his introduction to influential German enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) could have come from Stenhouse who read Lessing closely.89 Stenhouse was an influential literary patron, who impressed on others the importance of the great tradition of European classical scholarship from the Renaissance to the present, a tradition already familiar to Mitchell from his family’s books. Mitchell owned many untranslated French titles including novels by popular author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850).90 He inherited a respect for French culture from his mother. Stenhouse and Deniehy shared this respect. A favourite author of Mitchell’s was Voltaire (1694-1778), judging by the number of the philosophe’s titles which he owned, including a ten volume set of Voltaire’s complete works, and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1829). Like Voltaire, Lessing championed freedom and believed in human reason and independence. As Grylls and Woolley were important to David, Stenhouse’s example was also significant in other ways. Stenhouse’s library of books was built up from Sydney. His books were bought for their content, not for rarity, beauty or value. Stenhouse was a modest man, who provided and looked to companionship based on books and love for them. He shared his knowledge and

88 Tennant was also a figure whose home was the centre of literary activity for St. Andrews’ townsfolk aiming for literary interests and self-improvement. William Tennant, The Thane of Fife, A Poem in Six Cantos (Edinburgh: Walker & Greig, 1822). (DSM/821.79/T); Margaretta Stenhouse died in 1889. Edinburgh-born Hamilton Collins Sempill (1794-1853) was granted 2560 acres in the Hunter Valley in 1831 and appointed to the Magistracy in 1838 with Alexander Walker Scott, Helenus Scott and David C. F. Scott. SG, January 9, 1836. Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 118. 89 Mitchell owned titles by Lessing (1729-1781), including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon (Sir Robert Phillimore, (Transl., Ed.) (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874) (DSM/701/L); The Dramatic works of G. E. Lessing (Transl., Helen Zimmern Ed.) (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878) (DSM/832.61); The old German puppet play of Doctor Faust: turned into English (Transl. T. C. H. Hedderwick) (London: K.Paul, Trench & Co., 1887) (DSM/398.2/H). Significantly, Lessing maintained that poetry and painting have different characteristics, that are important conceptually when considered in terms of archival records. They offer different measure of documentary evidence when viewing both as records because poetry extends in time and painting in space, 90 Auguste Ricard et al, Romans (Paris, n.d.) in a collection of French fiction (DSM/Q843.73).

165 enthusiasm in a scholarly and generous manner.91 He pursued a life-long liberal education, enjoying a life of intellectual inquiry, and friendships made in sharing an appreciation of literary pleasures. The pages of Mitchell’s books from this period emit a strong air of self- reliance and anti-authoritarianism in keeping with his family’s tradition of free- thinking. He enjoyed George Cruikshank (1792-1878) and the visual satire of past masters such as Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and James Gilray (1757-1815), whose sketches attacked government repression and personal greed.92 Cruikshank and similar illustrators were authors of original genius, and Mitchell clearly savoured how their satirical pens savaged vanity and venality. Their titles were among the many that he owned which were related to issues of injustice; their number implies a strong interest in the issues of inequality and in social reform. Curiously – given his literature on societal development, and the pronounced sense of community involvement which his family possessed – Mitchell took no part in public life at a time when leadership was needed in public service, particularly from native sons. His family was committed to Australia, unlike those many colonists who viewed the colony as a mere place of temporary resort during the accumulation of their wealth (like Charles Nicholson who lived in England from 1862). Why then was Mitchell not among the native-born involved in establishing a civil society essential for statehood? Perhaps Deniehy’s shooting star played a part in this. Mitchell could not have escaped Deniehy. He was a conspicuous figure whose oratorical brilliance drew crowds and was much celebrated. Neither is it inconceivable that Mitchell was among those at Deniehy’s Pitt Street gatherings, or that they encountered each other at Stenhouse’s home, let alone while rummaging through Sydney’s bookstalls. Social pretensions that complicated colonial life could also have played a part. It was difficult to achieve conscientious commitment and gain respect from the public when personal attachments coloured principle and policy.93 Deniehy was critical of the 800 new appointments made in Cowper’s five years of office to 1863. The Press criticised many of Cowper’s appointments for failing to meet tests of character and

91 Jordens, Stenhouse, 2, 120. 92 For Mitchell’s taste for satire and humour see Chanin, Book Life, 145; Mitchell owned titles by Rowlandson, Gillray, and over 50 titles by Cruikshank. Also, James Hannay, Satire and Satirists: six lectures (London: David Bogue, 1854) (DSM/808.7/H). 93 Hirst, Democracy, 191.

166 education.94 In Parliament Deniehy scorned the ‘gentlemanly values’ among the liberals, mocking their low origins and lack of education. Boorish behaviour among some of them brought public life into disrepute. Henry Parkes was also critical of the low quality of parliamentarians and of the electorate for choosing them. He refused Cowper’s offer of job of inspector-general of prisons (intended to keep Parkes out of politics) and re-entered Parliament as the champion of higher standards in public life. Parkes urged voters not to rush into electing men newly sprung from among themselves but to choose ‘true English gentlemen’.95 Positions (as in the magistracy) were accepted for social prestige rather than from a sense of responsibility, leaving a never-ending need for more magistrates. Mitchell’s insight into this issue came from his uncles. Helenus Scott began his public career as stipendiary police magistrate, living the migratory existence that this entailed until 1858 when he became Newcastle’s police magistrate.96 His brother David Scott was police magistrate for Sydney from 1860. Deniehy was struck by the contrast observable between the progress made in material prosperity and the retrograde character of public policy. This mismatch was observed by The Times in London in December 1866, which noted how unrepresentative of the Australian Colonists their self-government was: ‘It is melancholy to reflect how little the Governments which these young energetic communities have set over them correspond to the character of the people whom they rule.’97 Whether to offer encouragement, or from genuine belief, The Times editorial for 31 May 1866 observed that among the colonists there existed ‘a population more than equal to their fellow-subjects at home’. The paper stated that a random sample would find men ‘of high capacity, and fully qualified intellectually to play the part of statesmen.’98 Mitchell was not persuaded to follow his father and uncles in their community involvement. He forewent public life, preferring the Republic of Letters. Perhaps he harboured the romance of literary ambitions such as were fanned by the likes of Woolley, Deniehy and Stenhouse. Certainly in these years Mitchell had an example

94 SMH, November 29, 1859, 131. 95 ‘Public Dinner to Mr. Parkes’, SMH, April 5, 1864, 3. 96 Allen, Rose Scott, 43. 97 The Times, December 29, 1866, 6. 98 ‘The Alleged failure of Representative Government’, The Times, May 31, 1866, 9.

167 from Grylls, Woolley, Deniehy and Stenhouse. Grylls lived a life of dedicated service. He was committed to democratic learning, as was Woolley. Deniehy highlighted how local politics eroded the integrity of native-born ability and fought for its recognition. Stenhouse also recognised local ability. Moreover, by his patronage of local talent he connected local literary ambitions with Europe’s literary traditions and thereby united the colony with a common civilized culture.99 Coleridge recommended against being ‘merely a man of letters’.100 The expression ‘Republic of Letters’ stems from the words res and publica, and came about from the early fifteenth century as Respublica litterarie. The expression refers to ‘shared pursuit of knowledge for the common good’, a sentiment that became allied with Victorian reformism. Reformism is where Mitchell would later turn his focus.101 Deniehy overlooked the experience that was added to the colonial legal fraternity by a cultured man like Edward Wise (1818-1865), a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Wise arrived in Sydney in 1854 with experience as a Middle Temple barrister. He was also a legal writer, who followed in the steps of legal writer John William Smith (1809-1845). Highly erudite, Smith produced in 1834 a compendium of mercantile law, the first text on the subject as a whole and which ran through thirteen editions to 1931. In 1854 Wise edited the fifth (and posthumous) edition of Smith’s An elementary view of the proceedings in an action at law which was advertised in The Times as being useful to the lawyer and necessary for the law student.102 Before reaching Sydney, Wise published seven titles on law from reports of new magistrates’ cases (1844) to the laws of bankruptcy (1853). The London Times said that Wise’s Law relating to riots (1848) ‘brought together in a small compass a mass of information’, making it invaluable ‘to magistrates, special constables, and others, who have not the means of searching for the law, which otherwise is only to be found in expensive and ponderous volumes.’103 He wrote a supplement to Richard Burns’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer. First published in 1755, this was

99 According to Bertram Stevens, Mitchell told him that from the age of thirty he turned to the solitary pursuit of being a reader: Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 39. 100 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 1:231; 2:85. 101 This view would fit with the assessment made by Michael Roberts that the unrelenting progress of the mid-Victorian years provoked the sense that constant awareness and adjustment was required of the cultural restructuring then occurring. Roberts, Making English Morals, 193. 102 ‘Smith’s Action at Law’, May 17, 1855, 13. 103 ‘The Law of Riots’, Times, June 5, 1848, 3. See also ‘The Common Law Procedure Act’, Times, July 10, 1852, 13.

168 the most popular work ever written on justices of the peace and ran through thirty editions. Early among lawyers who approached law systematically, Wise turned his energies to providing useful information. In Sydney Wise was appointed alongside Stenhouse to examine those seeking admission to practice as attorneys. In 1859 Wise was appointed attorney-general. He was elevated to the bench the following year. If Wise served as further model of scholastic value (after Grylls, Deniehy and Stenhouse), family legal experience also shaped Mitchell’s outlook. English observers of politics in New South Wales urged colonists to treasure the privilege of governing themselves. Bearing in mind events across Europe, the London Times reminded colonists that few governments had allowed free speech and free thought. It wrote: ‘The majority of the sons of men are reined in, bridled up, saddled, spurred and bitted with ukases, edicts, arrests, police, gendarmes, passports, chains, and dungeons.’104 The paper advised colonial parliamentarians to ‘Let those few who hold the precious gift be cautious how they use it, lest they make it, instead of a blessing to themselves, a scorn and laughing stock to others.’ The privilege of a democracy carried responsibility. Mitchell’s appreciation of this came from family experience with service in the magistracy. All the Scott brothers served as magistrates, (with the exception of Patrick, the youngest of them). The position carried responsibility over all offences. Plunkett’s Australian Magistrate described magisterial duties as ‘the preservation of the peace, and [to ensure] the quiet rule and government of our people’.105 The object of the Magistracy was to investigate the truth of ‘all manner of felonies, poisonings, trespasses, or extortions whatsoever, and of all and singular other crimes and offences…and to inspect all indictments’. Would spending a life in ‘gainful appreciation of all the little arts of chicane’ (as Plunkett’s put it) hold appeal for Mitchell, fresh from a liberal education? Most likely he sought more in life than to have Blackstone at his finger ends.106 Mitchell reputedly turned down appointment as Attorney General in 1870

104 ‘Among the great achievements of our century’, The Times (London), 1 December 1856, 6. 105 Edwin C Suttor, Plunkett’s Australian Magistrate: A guide to the duties of a Justice of the Peace with numerous forms (Sydney: W.A. Colman, 1847), 232-3 (DSM/347.96/P). 106 As Thomas Dibdin put it; Dibdin also forewent practicing law. E. J. O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliographer and Bibliomaniac Extraordinary 1776-1847 (Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1967), 11-12. Sir William Blackstone’s influential four volume overview of English law Commentaries on the Laws of England was first published in 1766. Mitchell owned a copy of the fourth edition (1858) of Blackstone’s New commentaries on the laws of England prepared for publication by (later Sir) James Stephen: Henry John Stephen, New commentaries on the laws of England: (partly founded on Blackstone) 4th ed. (London: Butterworths, 1858) (DSM/347/S).

169 when Charles Cowper was premier through most of the year, although this has not been verified.107 Historian Brian Fletcher considers the offer surprising, but concedes it as symptomatic of an age in which social position mattered more than professional judgement.108 Literature Mitchell owned from this period suggests he was of one mind with Deniehy over patronage politics of the times. If Mitchell felt that the self-interest shown by parliamentarians during the Cowper administration was morally repugnant, he may well have considered it would be difficult to become Attorney General. James Mitchell kept aloof from party politics, which he appears to have disliked; if Mitchell resembled his father, and found the heated political climate too adversarial, he may well have found himself at a disadvantage. When positions carried political obligation, Mitchell (like his father) did not wish to be beholden. If offered the Attorney- Generalship, Mitchell could do nothing else but refuse it, aware of the compromise it would require.109 He made a moral decision when electing to stand apart from public life. With his background, it is not difficult to see how Mitchell stood apart generally from conditions surrounding him. Scottish conservatism disfavoured showiness and could also have contributed to his shying from public life and social pretensions in Sydney. David Buchanan, a prominent divorce law reformer, thought Sydney society was pervaded by flunkeyism and snobbishness. In his view, so much talk about respectability in Sydney society sprang from doubts held by most people as to their own respectability: The straining and striving among a certain class of Sydney society, to be thought superior to others, is pitiable in the extreme. This is the essence of Society. Buckingham Palace is not more expensively or gorgeously furnished than the room I was sitting in, and yet the conversation going on

107 David Buchanan, Political portraits of some of the Members of the Parliament of New South Wales (Sydney: Davies and Co., 1863), 22 (DSM/308/P14). Cowper was Premier from January 13, 1870 to December 15, 1870. (Sir) Charles Cowper was preceded by (Sir) John Robertson and followed by (Sir) James Martin. Cowper, Martin, and Robertson dominated the House from 1860 to 1872, each variously serving as premier during those twelve years until Henry Parkes took premiership in 1872. From 1872 to 1877, the premiership oscillated between Robertson and Parkes. 108 Fletcher, Obsession, 11. Fletcher quotes Tyrrell’s observation to this effect: JR Tyrrell Papers c.1824-1959 ML MSS 505, 3(4). 109 Buchanan, Portraits, 22.

170 around me made me think I was in Petticoat Lane. A virtuous, honest, devoted, man of genius, would pass unnoticed among them, if poor.110

Likewise, to ‘Orion’ Horne, prevailing characteristics among young colonial men were ‘reckless energy, arrogant self-dependence and self assertion, and an utter scorn of all the accomplishments, refinements, and graces of education and polished society or even ordinary politeness of intercourse.’ Horne was not the only contemporary observer to notice that young colonial men were ‘a rough, pushing, pioneer population.’111 Restraint, which was in keeping with Scottish regard for tradition, was in short supply. Horne considered that anyone working in any of ‘the higher branches of art’ (whether a man of letters, an artist, scholar, or professor), were ‘most shamefully driven to the wall.’ A few took clerical positions in the growing number of government offices, but the age of useful employment had little need for knowledge of the finer points of literary wit; it wanted mechanics or labourers. As Marcus Clarke would write in 1884,

See the languid man of letters –what a precious guy he looks! Wearing out his health and eyesight poring over beastly books.112

Mitchell’s cousins (Saranna’s sons) showed there was little call for work of the more reflective kind. They became bank managers and police magistrates.113 Mitchell gained a brother-in-law in 1860, when his elder sister, Augusta, married Edward Christopher Merewether, Francis Merewether’s first cousin. Edward had arrived in Sydney nineteen years earlier (when Francis Merewether was acting colonial treasurer). Sixteen years older than Mitchell, London-born Edward was educated at Charterhouse, Westminster, and Oxford University College (1838) without taking a degree. Public service was a feature of his family. His younger brother, Sir William Lockyer Merewether (1825-1880), was a soldier and political

110 Buchanan, Portraits, 45. 111 R. H. Horne, Australian Facts and Prospects: to which is prefixed the author’s Australian autobiography (London: Smith, Elder, 1859), 79. (DSM/982/H). 112 Marcus Clarke, ‘The Lay of the Loafer’ in The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume compiled and edited by Hamilton Mackinnon (Melbourne: Cameron, Laing, 1884), 305, (DSM/A828/C). 113 Saranna’s Scott’s eldest son, Helenus (‘Nene’) Scott, moved to New Zealand where he became a bank manager. His brother, George Scott, followed his father into the magistracy: Allen, Scott, 72; Reference to little practical utility for professional literary men: SMH, July 6, 1857, 8.

171 officer in India, whose valorous career was distinguished by much personal initiative. A shrewd politician and enlightened administrator, he would be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India in 1868 and appointed a member of the Council of India in 1876. In Sydney, Edward lived with his cousin Francis in Cumberland Street, neighbouring the Mitchells. The picture we have of him aged twenty-one on his arrival is that of a personable, self-assured young man.114 He had an equable nature, possessed good judgement, was meticulous, and held wide interests. Edward Merewether’s successful colonial career points to the nature of opportunities that were open to able men. He first became aide-de-camp to Governor Gipps (who governed until July 1846). Merewether was then appointed colonial secretary on the abortive expedition to the short-lived Colony of North Australia, situated roughly 100 miles north of Brisbane (in what was then still New South Wales). After William Gladstone’s plan to create the colony was abandoned with a change of ministry in London, Merewether returned to Sydney in January 1847. He became Commissioner of Crown Lands (1848-1854) for the Macleay Valley, stationed at Belgrave, near Kempsey to the north of the Hunter region. This was during a period when establishing dividing lines between properties was difficult, as it was only from 1851 that legal boundaries, as mapped out by the surveyor John Darke (1806-1844), were established. Merewether returned to England in 1858-9 to negotiate a steamship postal service between England and Australia via Panama. He was accompanied by the well-connected pastoralist, Edward William Terrick Hamilton (1809-1898), who chaired the committee assisting Merewether. In the two years before his marriage, Merewether was clerk of the Executive Council and was actively immersed in colonial affairs. Ultimately, the answer as to why Mitchell never practiced law may come from Merewether’s eldest brother, Englishman Henry Alworth Merewether (1812-1877). Named after his father, Henry was anchored in the law. His father was serjeant-at- law, the most senior type of lawyer from which judges were chosen. Henry Merewether, the elder, (1780-1864), was town clerk of the corporation of London from 1842-1859. He was also a historian whose principal work was a three-volume

114 Edward Merewether, c.1841 watercolour attributed to W. Nicholas, ML P2/342

172 history of the boroughs and municipal corporations of Britain (1835).115 The younger Henry Merewether was a bencher of the Inner Temple. A Queen’s Council from 1853, he served as the recorder of Devizes for thirty years. He made a world tour in the early 1870s, visiting Sydney to see his brother Edward. He formed the opinion that if he were a young man going out in the world he would not choose to be located in New South Wales. To him, Sydney suffered from a sleepy inactivity (and was unable to compete with the ‘greater-go-aheadness of Melbourne’). As he saw it, the problem with Sydney was ‘the gentry there…hold aloof from any participation in Government’. Government ‘is therefore inane…entirely in the hands of a not superior class…entirely a Government at the dictation and mercy of the mob.’116 In this light, Mitchell’s shying away from the bar – and political life – is not so surprising. In Sydney, he was simply being a man of his time and position. Mitchell became a member of the Australian Club in mid 1858. He was known to play cards with, among others, Yorkshire-born barrister (later Sir) John Bayley Darvall (1809-1883).117 They made an odd pair: the youth in his twenties with the middle-aged Darvall, who confronted one with his glassy dark eyes, a trace of his family’s ancestry in Spanish Flanders, and his somewhat florid dress style. But their association indicates there was more to Mitchell than appearances would suggest. Darvall was respectively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General from 1856, and Mitchell found much to learn from him. He was steeped in the law, the nephew of Sir John Bayley (1763-1841) to whom Darvall had been articled. Lord Bayley was a master of common law, whose Treatise on the Law of Bills of Exchange (1789) was a

115 Henry Alworth Merewether, Archibald John Stephens, The History of the Boroughs and Municipal Corporations of the United Kingdom from the earliest to the present time (London: Stevens and Sons, 1835); Leslie Stephen (Ed.), ‘Henry Alworth Merewether, 1780-1864’, Dictionary of National Biography, (London: Smith, Elder, 1894) Vol. 36, 275; Charles Welch, ‘Merewether, Henry Alworth (1780/81–1864)’, In rev. Alec Brian Schofield, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18584 (accessed July 14, 2009). 116 Henry Alworth Merewether, By sea and land, being a trip through Egypt, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, and America, all around the world (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 209. (DSM/ 910/ M). 117 J. R. Angel, The Australian Club 1838-1988:The First 150 Years (Sydney: John Ferguson in association with the Australian Club, 1988); R. W. Rathbone, ‘Darvall, Sir John Bayley (1809-1883)’, ADB, vol.4, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), 23-25; Arriving in Sydney in 1839, Darvall was politically active from 1844. A Queens Council from 1853, he was Solicitor General (1856-7) and several times Attorney General (1857-1865). Darvall was founding Director of the Australian Joint Stock Bank; member of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce; member of the first Senate of Sydney University (1850-1868); and Trustee of the Australian Club. Of liberal views in the early 1850’s, Darvall opposed the Constitution Bill in 1853, and joined the conservative Constitutional Association in 1860. He returned to Britain in 1865.

173 pioneering systematic work; notably he also advised Sir Robert Peel on the reform of Britain’s criminal law. Mitchell’s literary interests were already apparent. Club members then knew that Mitchell was ‘an authority on all matters relating to belles lettres.’118 Bertram Stevens, who knew Mitchell from around 1892, gives us the only account of his reading; Stevens tells us that at an early date Mitchell read Fielding, Scott, Shelley and Byron.119 Mitchell’s interest in satire and parody suggest that deeper concerns lay behind his seemingly carefree bachelor life. This vein runs through his titles, from James Gilray, George Cruikshank, and Douglas Jerrold as well as William Thackeray and his mentee James Hannay. James Hannay made it clear that satire qualifies and serves a humane purpose when he said that: ‘A satirist without want is a meaner creature than an ape; we may laugh, but we must love.’120 Identification with the subject under scrutiny was essential. Mitchell’s love of satire reflects the complexity in his own character. When Thackeray noted that his contemporary writers of the Victorian era resembled ‘the sardonic diving’s after the pearl of truth whose lustre is eclipsed in the display of the diseased oyster’, Mitchell agreed.121 He saw through their blusterings. His partiality for French humour and illustrated journals shows that he resisted the narrowing of mind and appreciation of beauty that was imposed on Victorian readers by the strait-laced morality of the more rigorous Evangelicalism of the day.122 He did not accept the stifling effects of the Evangelical code on intellectual life. He owned heterodox books, which the Church of England disfavoured, like historian James Anthony Froude’s non-conformist The Nemesis of Faith (1849) and John William Colenso’s The Pentateucy and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862-65). Colenso challenged the traditional historical accuracy and authorship by Moses of these books, and was temporarily excommunicated for this. Mitchell had no Evangelical scruples.123 Many Victorian homes owned a copy of Reverend Thomas

118 H. C. L. Anderson, Some Reminiscences of D. S. Mitchell, 1920, MLA1830, 4. 119 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 581-6. 120 James Hannay, Sketches in Ultramarine (London & New York: George Routledge & Co., 1854), 307. (DSM/827.89/H). 121 William Makepeace Thackeray, Thakerayana – notes and anecdotes, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 164. (DSM/928.23/T). 122 Background to this is outlined by Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (London: Dent, 1974), 165-8. 123 Later in his life he regarded churches with hostility: Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 14.

174 Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (1818) that was adapted for family reading and purged of any phrase that might offend an innocent mind.124 Mitchell never owned a copy. Awake to the realities of Evangelical straight-jacketting, he was plain-speaking, as if to contradict the conventions governing everyday life that informally censored literature. It can be assumed from the publication dates of the books he owned that he acquired them from around the time they were first released. This is probable because among books which he bought in the 1850s were newly-released titles reviewed in Fowler’s The Month by Jacques Arago, Charlotte Brontë, and William Aytoun (1813- 1865). He also bought histories by Thomas Doubleday (1790-1870), George Finlay (1799-1875), Antonio Gallenga (1810-1895), William Prescott, and Harriet Martineau. The many titles he owned from the different series of Bohn Libraries also show that he bought new releases.125 If he kept a reading diary, recording what he read and when he read, it has not survived. However, we do know what books he had and those which were in his father’s library by the late 1850s.126 These mostly came from English publisher William Pickering (1796-1854). Among them were Pickering’s ‘Small books on great subjects’ (from 1844), and others in this series like Sketches of Geology (1848). While the family library was one of general knowledge, titles reveal the Mitchells’ interest in the subjects of art, history, philosophy, and bibliography. Titles included Francis Bacon’s Of the proficience and advancement of learning (1605, their edition dated from 1840), Edward Gibbon’s eight volumed history of the Roman Empire (1827), Henry Drummond’s Histories of Noble British Families (1846), Henry Shaw’s Examples of Ornamental Metal Work (1836), bibliographer’s manuals as by William Thomas Lowndes (1834), and work by Emmanuel Kant, Malthus, and Wilhelm Von Humboldt. With reading being an accustomed activity within his

124 Thomas Bowdler, The Family Shakspeare, in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818). See also Noel Perrin, Dr Bowdler's legacy: a history of expurgated books in England and America, 3rd edn (Boston, Mass.: Godline, 1992). 125 Mitchell’s selection of current titles is evident when his receipts for purchases of current titles are matched against publishers’ catalogues and the notices of new releases advertised in books. Henry G. Bohn, Henry G. Bohn’s Catalogue of Books (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847-50) (DSM/017.4B). 126 Dr James Mitchell, Notebook, ML C374. A total number of 1231 titles were tallied under the following subject headings: Divinity 286, Law 29, Scientific 150, Voyages & Travels 114, History & Lives 154, Novels 211, Miscellaneous 287. Note that the subject heading of ‘Divinity’ included many philosophy titles.

175 family, it is likely that Mitchell read these books. Two particular strands of interest are clear from his reading. One is his interest in human society. The other is his interest in the freedom of expression. Books related to cases of libel feature prominently among Mitchell’s books. William Hazlitt, who discounted blind obedience to Toryism and empire building, was a favourite author. Mitchell also loved poetry. He was likely to have been influenced by his father’s medical background to read with an analytical mind. Analysis and poetry both entail a speculative caste of mind. A speculative approach was also suited to sociology, the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society and of social problems. This new science that focused on human society and change in it was emerging with social theorist Harriet Martineau during the 1850s. For some time, through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europeans looked to the Pacific region, with its different island cultures, as a ‘New World’ in terms of what might be learned there about human society and human nature. The microscope was applied to the Pacific region to find answers there to the questions arising from the social problems facing Britain. Conditions in Britain had degraded into a society that appeared far more primitive than societies untouched by so-called ‘civilization’.127 Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew drew attention to the degraded plight of many of England’s inhabitants. Answers were sought as to why human affairs were slow to progress toward good despite industrial progress. Digesting material like this absorbed time. It is not inconceivable that Mitchell shared the delight which William Hazlitt describes and which ‘Orion’ Horne (who idolized Hazlitt) quotes in his first volume of A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Nothing matched the joy of opening a book:

How delightful! To cut open the leaves, to inhale the fragrance of the scarcely-dry paper, to examine the type, to see who is the printer, to launch out in to regions of thought and invention (never trod till now), and to explore characters, (that never met a human eye before), this is a luxury worth sacrificing a dinner-party, or a few hours of a spare

127 Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5. Liebersohn outlines this concept of the New World spanning the Pacific Ocean (from New Zealand to Easter Island). This region held a special significance for intellectuals in their thinking about human nature and social change.

176 morning to. If we cannot write ourselves, we become by busying ourselves about it, a kind of accessories after the fact.128

Family life was central to life during the Victorian era. Family ties were particularly important among the Scots in Australia owing to the strength of kinship among them (and where they were also a discrete minority).129 The Scott-Mitchell family members were close-knit and Mitchell saw his family grow and disperse through the 1860s. His older sister and brother-in-law settled in Newcastle, building their home overlooking James’ Burwood Estate. Residence in Newcastle was a condition of the appointment that Edward Merewether took up in 1861 as Commissioner of Crown Lands and General Superintendant with the Australian Agricultural Company.130 Mitchell watched children absorb their lives, with a new infant born each year between 1862 and 1866, and another five born between 1868 and 1877. He saw this too with his contemporaries like William Windeyer who married English-born Mary Bolton. Likewise, from 1859 they raised a large family of eight children. By March 1865, Mitchell was rumoured to be engaged to Emily Manning.131 Nine years younger, born in May 1845, she was the daughter of (later Sir) William Montagu Manning Q. C., and the niece of Edward Wise. Her mother (Wise’s sister) died when Emily was an infant. Just four feet ten inches tall, she was thought to be delicate, yet she was intellectually robust and firmly interested in literature. John Woolley encouraged her literary interests, which she shared with Mitchell. They exchanged light-hearted poems around 1864. She was an attractive marriage prospect; her father was wealthy, prominent, and influential. Formerly a Supreme Court Judge and Solicitor General, he was during the late 1860s a substantial landholder, a director of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, counsel for the Australian Mutual Provident Society and on the senate of the University of Sydney. He would become Chancellor

128 R. H. Horne, ed., A New Spirit of the Age, 2nd ed. (London: Smith Elder & Company, 1844), 1:214 (DSM/820.4/N). 129 Prentis, The Scots in Australia (1983), 20. 130 E. J. Merewether (Comp.), “The Ridge”, Merewether, near Newcastle, NSW. ML PXA902/15-19; Merewether Family, ML Pic.Acc.1029. The Australian Agricultural Company held valuable concessions to coal mines at Newcastle. Australian Agricultural Company Annual Report, No.32, (London: The Company, 1856), (DSM/042/P36); For general background see Damaris Bairstow, A Million Pounds, A Million Acres: The Pioneer Settlement of the Australian Agricultural Association (Cremorne, N.S.W.: D. Bairstow, 2003). 131 Fletcher, Obsession, 12; Allen, Rose Scott, 56-8.

177 of the University in 1879. If the Mitchells were keen to see Emily become their daughter-in-law, they must have hoped that Manning did not have a long memory. In 1837, just arrived in Sydney, Manning sought chairmanship of the Quarter Sessions. The position was normally elected from among the Magistrates. Acrimonious discussion occurred over Manning’s election which the Scotts, as Independent Magistrates, opposed on the grounds that Manning had been improperly engineered into the position by the outgoing Governor, Sir Richard Bourke.132 Despite objection from the Scotts, who upheld the independence of the Bench from any political interference, Manning achieved the position, and became Solicitor General in 1844. However, Emily’s uncle Edward Wise and his wife were of similar mould to the Mitchell’s. Wise was a generous spirit for whom sound literature and sanitary improvement were the means to improve the welfare of the humbler classes whose interests he held foremost. He was above sectarianism and had a high sense of Christian duty. A devout Anglican, Wise was a lay delegate with James Mitchell at the 1859 Conference of the Anglican Church.133 Wise was a member of the Board attached to church schools with David Scott. Wise, with Mitchell family friend John Rae, was behind fundraising to build an Anglican church for Darlinghurst.134 An enthusiastic collector of local literature, he belonged to the Philosophical Society, was on the Parliamentary Library Committee, and set up a working men’s book club (which continued until 1871).135 His wife served with Augusta Mitchell on the ladies committee fundraising for the Clergy Daughters’ School at St. Catherine’s Waverley.136 The Mitchells enjoyed regular contact with the Merewethers and other relatives in Newcastle. Helenus and Saranna Scott were forced to sell everything at Glendon in 1858. Advertisements for the auction listed livestock, farm implements, household furniture, and a collection of books that was described as valuable.137 Their pastoral dream had failed. Their lowered social standing that followed their bankruptcy was eased by the support that Saranna received from her Selwyn and

132 ‘The Election’, SG, November 9,1837, 2; ‘The Election’, SG, November 11,1837, 2. 133 ‘Religious Memoranda’, SMH, November 10, 1858, 5. 134 ‘Church of England for Darlinghurst and Wooloomooloo’, SMH, March 7, 1856, 4; SMH, December 16, 1856, 1. 135 ‘New Notices of Motion, Tuesday March 3’, SMH, February 28, 1857, 4. 136 SMH, November 18, 1861, 1. 137 MM, July 1 1858, 3; MM, June 29, 1858, 3; MM June 17, 1858, 4.

178 Rusden relatives. They moved to Newcastle and began town life, with their children parcelled out to sympathetic relatives so as to ease the financial strain. Their daughters, Augusta (known as Gussie) and her younger sister Rose, regularly made the journey by steamship to Sydney with Mitchell, Merewether and Scott uncles. From time to time, both stayed with the Mitchell family in Sydney. Mitchell accompanied them to social events such as balls, concerts, and public lectures.138 He took them to events at the University. The University’s Great Hall towered in the skyline. Completed and opened in July 1859, it was the largest structure yet built in the colony and so was popular to visit. A sweeping view of Sydney could be enjoyed from the Hall. It was remarkable for its mullioned windows, quaint sharp gables, rich arabesques, and graceful buttresses. The Press made much of it. The Hall was not to everyone’s liking. It was described as ‘tame, dull, and mediocre in the extreme...A huge accumulation of stone and wood, neither useful nor ornamental – viewed at a distance an eyesore, seen closely merely a something to excite gaping wonder.’139 More to the point, the University’s fresh sandstone structures, with their gothic articulations, starkly contrasted with the degraded landscape surrounding the university. The contrast between the dank and dingy tenements and un-housing (as the Press called it) of the poorer classes in the district, and the formal pomp staged at the University, could not be ignored.140 Buildings in the district were coated in the dull black livery left by the smoke from adjacent factories and slaughterhouses and the nearby brewery. The stench from these overwhelmed some visitors. Stink too was being levelled at the University, for mocking the democracy that New South Wales was supposed to have. Public expenditure on the University was viewed by many with ill-disguised contempt, when children went wanting for basic literacy. The Moreton Bay Courier in Brisbane printed an article from the Empire: ‘When we see that a large number of the children in the colony are growing up in the most deplorable ignorance and vice, we cannot but regard the sum which has been lavished on the University as a piece of wasteful extravagance; a gross injustice to the people generally, and the manner of its outlay an

138 Scott Family, Notebook of Augusta and Rose Scott 1864-1865, May 20, 1864-November 14, 1865, ML B1528. 139 The Sydney University’, MBC, July 21, 1860, 6; Empire, June 25, 1860, 4. 140 Argus, June 28, 1864, 7.

179 insult to common sense.’141 Anger at government parsimony in the education of the lower classes was directed at the University. Far from serving the People’s interests, critics argued it served only the elite. Its Senate was looked on as a close corporation of baneful influence plundering public revenue to promote its self-importance. The Senate was pointed to as an irresponsible self-selected Senate –a clique who have perpetrated the miserable snobbery of disfiguring the building from top to bottom with their coats of arms –who have amused themselves and robbed the public exchequer by perpetrating abortions in stone which will stamp us for ages to come as a set of Vandals.142 Sanctioning the University’s expense was believed to be irresponsible of the Government. In early April 1861 Mitchell’s cousin, the Governor, Sir John Young addressed guests at the University’s Annual Commemoration. Seated on the dais below the Oxford window with John Woolley were James Mitchell and Edward Wise, alongside the members of the University. Immediately in front of the dais the considerable number of ladies sat with Lady Young. Sir John emphasised the value of a cultivated sensibility. He drew on Edinburgh philosopher Dugald Stewart’s opinion about forming intellectual habits early that build this temper of mind. ‘This habit of intellect is usually free from capricious biases, and affords a strong presumption that the temper is unsuspicious, open and generous.’ Systematized knowledge and civility are, he said, ‘the best possible defence against corruption, injustice and disorders of all kinds’ in countries where the expression of thought is free.143 The University’s graduates should be first among their countrymen in cultivation and intelligence, the guides and models of action and opinion. This responsibility was stressed a month later as Mitchell sat among the graduates who gathered when about sixty members of the University presented an address to the septuagenarian statesman William Charles Wentworth on his return from England to preside over the executive council. Acknowledged as the founder of the University, Wentworth spoke of the importance to ‘foster a regard for the teachings of the past and the study of those great principles which are the foundation

141 ‘The Sydney University’, MBC, July 21, 1860 6. 142 ‘The Sydney University’, MBC, July 21, 1860, 6. 143 ‘University of Sydney Annual Commemoration’, SMH, April 21, 1864, 6.

180 of all true liberty.’144 Mitchell and his cousins saw the new university museum with its Egyptian and Roman antiquities that came from the collection of Sir Charles Nicholson. When opening it, the Chancellor, E. Deas Thompson, stressed that the enterprise and research behind private collections like Nicholson’s were the nucleus from which came ‘our great national institutions, [like] the British Museum, in London.’145 He matched Nicholson’s name with that of Sir Hans Sloane. Mitchell’s cousin Rose Scott turned 17 in 1864. In photographs taken of Rose from this time, her blonde curls are pulled high atop her head in coquettish fashion, but her pensive look indicates her thoughtfulness. Her life up to then had centred on her family and its needs. After largely helping Saranna cope with making ends meet, Rose was a serious-minded woman of common-sense. She was accustomed to effort after helping her mother raise eight children. Rose’s feminist views took root as she watched Saranna struggle between many pregnancies and throughout Helenus’ absences. Rose struck up a friendship with Emily Manning who travelled with Mitchell to Newcastle, where the three spent time together. The Mitchell ‘clan’ extended to a wider circle that included the families of James Mitchell’s business associates.146 He brokered funds among individuals, often extending loans to ‘colonists of estate’ within the colony’s longest established families, which were closely linked by shared history. The intricacies of these connections could become sensitive when money became involved.147 Loans which James Mitchell made to landowner and politician Joseph Docker (1802-1884) exemplified these connections.148 Docker came to Sydney in 1834 after briefly working as a surgeon for the East India Company. The 10,000 acres which Joseph Docker owned in the Upper Hunter district neighboured the free selection of John Robertson, four times Premier. Docker criticised Robertson’s free selection before the survey bill. In 1861 when the government attempted to ‘swamp’ the Legislative Council to get Robertson and Deniehy’s measure through, James Mitchell was among the majority which opposed the measure. He joined the members who

144 SMH, May 10, 1861, 4. 145 ‘The University of Sydney, Annual Commemoration’, SMH, April 21, 1864, 5. 146 The ‘clan’ included the Selwyn and Rusden relatives to the Scotts. They were part of an extended circle, beyond the immediate Scott-Mitchell clan. 147 These colonial families with whom James Mitchell was connected are listed in Allen, Scott, 49. 148 David Scott Mitchell papers. MLPXA1037.

181 marched out, leaving no quorum to the Legislative Council. Joseph Docker became postmaster-general in January 1866 and was briefly colonial secretary in September 1868. In late 1864 James and Augusta Mitchell were photographed outside the entrance of their home.149 They are the picture of urban respectability. Augusta was affectionately known as ‘the Mum’, and he was referred to as ‘the Daddy’. Though 71, he still appears to have a spring in his step. However, a scrapbook of forty drawings shows that all was not well. Drawn in a child-like manner, they are titled Mutum est Pictura Poema. Though unsigned, their title page is sardonically inscribed ‘Original High Art kindly composed for and dedicated to DSM B.A. for the edification and special enlightenment of his mind during his sojourn in Tartarus by pitying beings in Elysium, March 19th 1868’.150 Elysium is the abode assigned to the blessed after death in Greek mythology, so a place or state of ideal happiness. With Tartarus the infernal of ancient Greek and Roman mythology, to what Hell do these refer ? The word ‘mutum’, meaning ‘silent’ and ‘mute’, is significant as these images are far from inexpressive. They are claustrophobic and raw with emotion. They could only have been executed by someone who was intimate with the feelings they portray. Mitchell turned 32 the day these drawings were dated. The sarcasm in the inscription comes from a caustic humor – for which he was known.151 The images are cruelly observed; remember how the fairly self-absorbed Leichhardt noted Mitchell’s keen eye. A bonneted woman holds an infant child up in her lap; she sits in profile, and her buck teeth are hideous. A young boy dressed in a smock stands on a table with tears streaming from his cheeks; this drawing is captioned ‘Mother’s pet at school’. A vendor at a counter holds a bag of coins; with his magnified eyes and teeth, he appears to personify greed. A couple sits uneasily before a table on Valentine’s Day; Valentine’s Day refers to the choosing of sweethearts, or mating. A woman at a table eats small stick-like people taken from an unlocked treasure-box on the table, and they are bleeding. All these images are drawn with a savage pen. The hand which drew these unsettling images resembles the hand which sketched in Mitchell’s university textbook, suggesting he made the drawings. They

149 Cumberland Place, Residence of Dr. James Mitchell, c.1865. MLSPF/388. 150 David Scott Mitchell: album of drawings and ephemera, c.1868-1892. MLL379/Box 4 No.1. 151 Jose, David Scott Mitchell, 470.

182 suggest he was chaffing at being kept on a tight rein. Romantic tensions, in the closely interconnected society to which Mitchell belonged, could have brought about the emotional stress that these drawings suggest. Rose Scott’s biographer, Judith Allen, has speculated that closeness between Mitchell and Rose (who was then 21) was disdained by the family, owing to his engagement to Emily Manning.152 Could there have been further reasons – social expectations conflicting with novel ambitions thought unacceptable, or a family coming apart at the seams ? Paternalistic, Victorian society favoured seniority, which could explain why James held a firm grip on the family’s financial affairs. It seems that his wife and son knew little about these. At the time considerable tension also gripped Sydney’s community. Just the week before, on 12 March, William Manning became a hero. The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alfred, the Queen’s second son, was in Sydney on the first royal tour of Australia. At a public gathering, he was shot at by an Irishman from Victoria. Henry O’Farrell sprang from the crowd and wounded the Prince. Manning disarmed O’Farrell.153 There was outrage in the colony over this assassination attempt; the next day a mass indignation meeting of 20,000 people assembled in Hyde Park and reaffirmed loyalty to the Queen. Indignation meetings occurred across the colonies. William Macleay, fearing a Fenian conspiracy, moved for a select committee to inquire into the existence of a conspiracy. No Fenian conspiracy was found. The Prince’s assailant acted alone; he was hung. A collection of poems by university student William Henry Hazell Yarrington, Prince Alfred’s Wreath, was released in aid of a fund for the hospital which was built following the Prince’s successful recuperation. In October, Manning was appointed Attorney General. The assassination attempt caused an up-swelling of patriotism. It aroused the national sentiments of the Scottish portions of the community and boosted the volunteer movement, including the formation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Highlanders.154 The event shows the tension that was in the air. Fear of war with France contributed to a sense of insecurity that was circulating in the 1860s. With the French based in New Caledonia, young men from Sydney’s ‘respectable and educated classes’ formed themselves into volunteer forces. Bands of gentleman volunteers formed spontaneously and maintained order in rifle matches and parades, which

152 Allen, Scott, 57-59. 153 ‘Attempt to Assassinate H. R. H. Prince Alfred at Clontarf’ SMH, March 13, 1868, 5. 154 ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’s Highland Brigade’, SMH, May 22, 1868, 5; Empire, May 22, 1868, 3.

183 became occasions for the gathering of fashionable company. Many of the top-hatted volunteer artillery sprang from the armchairs of the Australian Club and Metropolitan Hotel. There is no record of whether Mitchell was among them. At Clontarf, where the Duke was wounded, William Windeyer addressed the crowd gathered at a picnic of the Australian Patriotic Association. He toasted ‘The Land we Live in’.155 Patriotism, he said, was unselfish ambition that could never be self-seeking, when all efforts were directed to the promotion of the public weal. The sentiment of patriotic duty was loyalty to the motto ‘One Country, One People’. Selfish ambition would convulse the Mitchell family. This ran in opposition to the culture of giving and of collective enterprise in which the Mitchell family were immersed. James Mitchell died on 1 February 1869. Aged 74, his death was not unexpected. A change in his health was noticed ‘for a long time’, Mitchell would later say.156 He left an estate valued at more than £100,000 (equivalent in 2010 to over £4.5 million). He owned over 45,000 acres, largely in the County of Northumberland (today’s Hunter Region), which the press in New Zealand described as ‘property of immense value.’157 What was completely unexpected was that a former business associate, German-born Ernest Wolfskehl, was named as sole executor of the estate. Wolfskehl gained James’ trust when they met over the Currawong Copper Mine near Goulburn. Wolfskehl was a director of the company. He was allegedly the brother of a wealthy banker from the Grand Duchy of Hesse in west-central Germany.158 Foremost in supporting any mining enterprises, James favoured German industrial knowledge and skill that might provide progressive production methods; Wolfskehl professed experience in the analysis of ores.159

155 Empire, September 8, 1869, 5. 156 And perhaps explaining the frustrations expressed in the drawings. SMH, May 14, 1869, 3. 157 ‘Extraordinary Will Case’, Daily Southern Cross, June 10, 1869, 4. 158 ‘A great will case’, BC, June 12, 1869, 3; Wolfskehl claimed he awaited funds from his family in Darmstadt. Living in Darmstadt at the time was wealthy Jewish banker Joseph Carl Theodor Wolfskehl (1814–1863). The Wolfskehl family were a Jewish patrician family which lived in Germany from the time of Charlemagne. See William D. Godsey, Jr. Nobles and Nation in Central Europe, Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004), 38. 159 Chemistry (and engineering) were tools to progressive products and German expertise was respected. German candle-makers led in acetylene gas: Norman Selfe, Annual address (Delivered to the Engineering Section of the Royal Society of New South Wales, June 20th 1900), (Sydney: 1900), 38. German expertise could also offset colonial labour shortages; in late 1847 Mitchell was part of a syndicate who brought to the colony 45 experienced German vine dressers. Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 62.

184 Truth of the trust that James Mitchell placed in Wolfskehl is not clear, however the interest that he took in him can be understood in light of his money- lending practice. Evidence of the importance of the Wolfskehl family, one of the oldest Jewish families of the Rhein-Main region, is visible today in Darmstadt in the park there that bears their name, Wolfskehl’scher Park. Heyum Wolfskehl (1776- 1886) rose from origins as a tradesman’s son to court banker (hofbankier).160 The bank that he began in the late eighteenth century, Bankhaus Heyum Wolfskehl und Söhne, prospered. In the age of Absolutism German princely courts relied on the network among Jewish money-lenders like Wolfskehl, whose financial advice gained him considerable wealth. The Wolfskehls built further wealth and influence through marriage within hofjude (court jew) banking families, consolidating their influence and wealth with banks in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Vienna. Also among the Wolfskehls were prominent jurists and littérateurs.161 Like the Mitchell family, the Wolfskehl’s were friends of the arts and significant in the economic life of their towns. Apprehension that Mitchell held about his father’s financial affairs were realised upon James Mitchell’s death. Letters show that Mitchell had been concerned about the influence that Wolfskehl appeared to be exerting on his father (and this may explain the frustration expressed in his drawings). He shared his apprehension with Edward Merewether to whom Mitchell wrote that he ‘can only play a waiting game until the Daddy gets better or we see more clearly how the bank is as to his involvements with Wolfskehl.’162 Unbeknown to them, James signed a will prepared for him by Wolfskehl. This made Wolfskehl, the executor and a beneficiary of his estate with considerable real property (rather than Augusta and her brother Helenus as co-executors, as James intended in an earlier will made in 1841). Mitchell’s uneasiness increased when Wolfskehl alluded to holding unpaid cheques from his father.163 Mitchell did not know that Wolfskehl had been receiving

160 Klaus Barner, ‘Paul Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize’ in AMS (Notices of the American Mathematical Society) 44, no.10 (November 1997): 1301-2. 161 Family members included the poet Ludwig Braumfels (1810-1885). A later literary descendant, poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) settled in New Zealand: Gerti Blumenfeld, Karl Wolfskehl (1869- 1948) Exul Poeta, in Ann Gluckmann (Ed.) Identity and Involvement, Auckland Jewry, Past and Present (Palmerston Nth, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 1990). 162 David Scott Mitchell to Edward Merewether January 18,1869, Merewether Estate Archives A1A David Scott Mitchell Private Papers 1869-1906. 163 ibid.

185 substantial payments from James from 1864, when Wolskehl defrauded him of £25,000. Much of this information was yet to unravel for Mitchell and his family. Profoundly unsettling to them was the fact that their problem, up till then unseen by them, had been apparent to others like close family friend, merchant John Campbell, who expected the matter would come before the courts and offered to give evidence.164 Mitchell tried to make sense of the mess in which he found his father’s affairs. He collected evidence revealing Wolfskehl’s dishonesty. Probate was delayed. The family pressed for the earlier will to be upheld. In March the Joint Stock Bank (of which Emily Manning’s father was a director) filed a suit against the Mitchells to claim the amounts written in cheques and promissory notes by James to Wolfskehl. The Mitchells had to sell land to pay off debts. The carriage and horses went in April.165 Books had to go too.166 Mitchell had to apply to the court for clearance to borrow funds with which the Mitchells could meet their liabilities. Under duress they were forced to seek funds from lenders by advertising in the Herald.167 This offended and humiliated Mitchell, who thought the money might have been obtained more discreetly. Land which James owned was mortgaged to banker Thomas Walker who lent them £25,000. Close ties among long-established colonial families meant the affair distressed others because loans which James had made to individuals among these pioneer families had to be called in. This had a ripple effect due to the interconnectedness among them. One such loan was to Joseph Docker, who had difficulty paying readily, until he in turn received payment from South Coast pastoralist Alexander Berry.168 Eventually the case came before the courts, when witnesses who gave evidence to support James’ good character showed how this interconnecting network among the propertied class formed the backbone of Sydney society. Among them were London-born surgeon Dr Arthur A’Beckett, M.L.C. (1812-1871) brother of the

164 John Campbell to David Scott Mitchell, February 18, 1869, Merewether Estate Archives A1A. 165 David Scott Mitchell to Edward Merewether April 7,1869, Merewether Estate Archives A1A David Scott Mitchell Private Papers 1869-1906. 166 Bradley, Newton and Lamb Auctioneers, 8 July 1869 quoted by Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books’, 81. 167 SMH, April 24, 1869, 6. 168 David Scott Mitchell to Edward Merewether April 7,1869, Merewether Estate Archives A1A David Scott Mitchell Private Papers 1869-1906.

186 Chief Justice of Victoria.169 Another was Glasgow-born former ship surgeon Dr John Macfarlane, M.L.C. (1813-1873), who was associated with the Sydney Infirmary, presided over the Australian Medical Association, and was a Trustee of the Australian Museum from 1869. Others included Irish-born pastoralist John Findlater Clements, M.L.C. (1819-1884), and Sydney-born merchant John Campbell, M. L. C., twice Colonial Treasurer and a generous benefactor to the Church. The Great Will Scandal, as the press referred to the affair, came before the Supreme Court in mid-May 1869, and was heard over twelve days. Irish-born James Martin (1820-1886) was engaged to prosecute the case for Helenus and Augusta Scott; William Manning defended Wolfskehl. The Press made much of the trial. Not only was it reported as the most extraordinary trial of its kind to be heard by Australian Courts, but it was considered that the trial would be thought ‘a very extraordinary case in the Courts of Westminster’.170 Each day the courtroom was packed. A picture of the rancour that simmered within the small society that made up Sydney comes from David Buchanan. He disliked James Martin, whom he dismissed as ‘a mere Newgate solicitor’ of little ability. He considered Martin’s courtroom style was trying, ‘ineffective, commonplace, and monotonous.’171 Martin was, he said, ‘a mere shallow-pated pretender, very ill-informed on general subjects, the coarseness and vulgarity of his mind most legibly expressed upon a face destitute of every trace of intellect, and his intense anxiety to associate with what the poor creature considers genteel people – the surest indicator of a low origin’.172 A groom’s son, Martin was thrusting and intensely anxious to associate with the influential. Buchanan sneered that Martin made every effort ‘to gain admission to the society of flunkeys in Bent Street (where) the door was closed against him.’ He was referring to the Australian Club, where James had been Vice-President. Buchanan implied that the Mitchell case appealed to Martin because James had been a respected member of the establishment which Martin was hoping to enter. Notwithstanding Buchanan’s vitriol, Martin was an eminent lawyer, an ardent patriot, and had been Premier and Attorney-General

169 Companies in which he invested in forced him to return to New South Wales from England where he lived from 1858-1865. 170 BC, June 12, 1869, 3. 171 Buchanan, Portraits, 20. 172 Buchanan, Portraits, 22.

187 between 1866 and 1868. He was knighted in 1869. Wolfskehl put up a determined fight. He claimed the money had been lent to him against funds he was expecting to receive from Germany. He alleged James had appropriated amounts owing to him when, as Mitchell found, his father never held the alleged funds at all. Wolfskehl not only embezzled funds from his father, but also perjured himself while smearing James Mitchell’s name in court. The jury of twelve took ten minutes to deliver their verdict against Wolfskehl.173 He tried to appeal against the decision. As late as December 1869, the Australian Joint Stock Bank pressed claims on the Mitchells for cheques drawn. Settlement of the estate was delayed for a further five years. Legal partitioning of the estate was not achieved until 1874 when James’ property was divided between Mitchell and his two sisters. Letters which Mitchell wrote to Merewether during the ordeal and the trial proceedings provide insight into a number of things.174 Mitchell gave evidence which told how he asked Merewether, late in 1868, to propose to his father that he would become acquainted with his father’s affairs and help him in managing them. Mitchell said he made the proposal with great reluctance, and only because he saw it was necessary owing to his father’s tight control of family matters. Whatever role his father saw for him, James had been unprepared to hand over his affairs, even when ailing.175 This may reflect more on how secretive James was about his affairs, than on the opinion he held about his son’s financial acumen. Confidentiality was essential in the close-knit society they kept. Nor was keeping private unusual in paternalistic Victorian times.176 Not until the trial did Mitchell learn that eighteen months earlier his cousin, James Rusden, when manager of the Bank of Australasia in Sydney, rejected an application from Wolfskehl for a large loan to be secured by bills and mortgages on James Mitchell’s landed property. Lack of knowledge of James’ financial arrangements caused the Mitchells indebtedness to the banker Thomas Walker.

173 ‘The Great Will Case, Wolfskehl v. Mitchell, and another’, SMH, May 18, 1869, 2; MM, May 18, 1869, 1. 174 Merewether Estate Archives, David Scott Mitchell Private Papers 1869-1906, Newcastle Region Library: Mitchell to Merewether, January 18, 1869; Mitchell to Merewether, August 10, 1869. 175 SMH, May 14, 1869, 3, 5. 176 The importance of privacy was first described by Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, Robert Baldick, Transl. (London: Cape, 1962), 413.

188 Medical evidence at the trial revealed that James was in a dying state for many months before his death. The family pleaded that his was a case of senile insanity. This could explain how James – formerly respected as a good reader of men – had misjudged Wolfskehl’s character. It could explain why he failed to take his son into his confidence. Having his father’s mental state questioned publicly pained Mitchell. It was said that his life was ‘blasted midway’ by the trauma.177 Family was the refuge from the public world during the Victorian era. The trial blew that refuge open for all to see. His family was exposed for lacking the stability it had always prided itself in having. Mitchell and his mother were so outraged they refused to negotiate with Wolfskehl. The only place Mitchell would meet Wolfskehl, he said, was at the foot of the gallows, with Wolfskehl to mount them immediately.178 Public scrutiny of their affairs compromised the Mitchells’ sense of social distinction. The Mitchells were respected as ‘Ancients’, the name by which earlier settlers were distinguished from more recently arrived immigrants. Earlier more- established settlers generally felt themselves apart in Sydney society. They considered that new arrivals lacked historical sense of the colony or attachment to it. Moreover, since the gold rush, it was felt necessary to protect oneself from individuals of dubious origin (and perhaps of dubious character).179 This was achieved (it was thought) by maintaining social distinction. As David Buchanan observed, snobbery in Sydney was pronounced. David Buchanan referred to the importance placed by Sydney residents on respectability. Longer-established settlers prided themselves on their connections. Much was made of family pedigree among families in the social register. James Mitchell sought a coat of arms from the College of Arms not long before his death, showing that such registers of social standing mattered. The sense of social distinction that the family possessed was reinforced by their participation in Government House with the future Baron Lisgar’s arrival. This genetic link set Augusta Mitchell and her

177 Allen, Scott, 60 quoting Bertram Stevens, David Scott-Mitchell, ML A1830, 24; Anderson, Reminiscences, ML A1830. 178 Mitchell to Edward Merewether, August 10, 1869, Merewether Estate Archives A1A David Scott Mitchell Private Papers 1869-1906. 179 For example of this see Kirsten McKenzie, A Swindler’s Progress, Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009).

189 family apart.180 Their literary interests could have added to this sense of distinction. David’s mother was an avid reader, who exchanged books with Sir John Young. Poetry written by her youngest son, Patrick, was frequently published.181 Novels written by her daughter-in-law Maria Scott were also published from London.182 Generally their literary interest contrasted with the more customary interests enjoyed by many around them. In 1867 Woolley’s successor, Charles Badham thought colonial youth were ‘entirely wedded to those pursuits which develop the physical energies that they have little taste or time for intellectual acquirements’.183 Literary pursuits could be thought eccentric by those who, as contemporary accounts put it, were busily engaged in establishing themselves and had little time for anything else. If respectability was socially paramount, then it is understandable that the public airing of family affairs deeply upset Mitchell. He had only known the best the colony offered. He was reared in the comfort of Cumberland Place, given a sense of pedigree by his family and gained further distinction through his literary interests. The security he enjoyed until then was shattered. Worse, the insecurity of his position was bared for all to see. The Mitchells belonged to the colony’s elite. James Mitchell conducted his business affairs on the strength of connections. If they thought themselves apart from the generally self-seeking rabble, their public shame was even greater when they appeared little different from others. The Mitchells were not immune from the colony’s altered social character, reshaped by waves of more recent migrants. They had been duped under their noses by a ‘gentleman’ fortune hunter no different from other gold-seekers crowding the colony. Significantly, the case hinged on the validity of a document. Most hurtful were the allegations which Wolfskehl made against James’ character. Wolfskehl implied that James had been fraudulent, and the case was

180 August 31, 1866: Mitchell Family Papers ML MSS 379/Box 4; D.S.Mitchell ML Am121/1 Am 72/3. 181 Patrick Scott published in London largely through the 1850s. His work included editing two editions of work by English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), the educationalist and devoted assistant to Florence Nightingale. Clough’s sister was suffragist Anne Clough, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. 182 Maria Scott published under the names of M.I.S.T. and Spray: M.I.S.T., Annine; Spray, Pearl. 183 Charles Badham, ‘Commemoration speech, 1867’ in Charles Badham, Speeches and lectures delivered in Australia (Sydney: W. Dymock, 1890), 2 (DSM/370.4/B).

190 decided on the grounds that James was not of sound mind when making the latest will. Mitchell’s father was known as a ‘gentleman of remarkable enterprise and intelligence.’184 He was quick to see the future importance of the Australian colonies. An esteemed ‘old settler’, he was a man of mark, respected as a doctor, industrialist, and a parliamentarian, who was closely connected with the colony’s leading men. Wolfskehl’s allegations required that James Mitchell’s name and character be defended and restored.185 Understandably, Mitchell saw his father as a paragon of disinterested public service. He felt that his father never received tributes of the kind that were customary and that the years of service his father gave to the community went unrecognised.186 Tongues wagged again when David’s younger sister, Margaret, married in May 1870. Little is known of her husband, William Bell Quigley, whose address was given as Cumberland Street. He was described as being Irish-Catholic, and the family’s stable-hand or coachman. It appears a dispute occurred over the Quigley’s share of the estate; Merewether sought legal advice from Lincoln’s Inn, as a telegram sent from London in June 1874 reveals.187 The affair brought Mitchell and Merewether closer. Merewether (who turned fifty in 1869) became the pater familias. David Scott offered his help, but his own financial uncertainty meant that Mitchell relied on Merewether’s prudent financial advice.188 If Mitchell had hoped to find satisfaction in professional life, this ambition was disturbed by the need to attend to family affairs. For the moment, reality suspended any dreams he held for the future. In the context of his surroundings and in

184 Badham, Speeches, 2. 185 Once again, like with the Thompson-Sydney Hospital saga over thirty years before: see Chanin, Book Life, 32-35. 186 As was given to the once-convict and surgeon William Bland and to William Manning, when he resigned as Attorney General from ill health in 1857 and returned to England briefly. W. Bland, R. N., Services Rendered to New South Wales, 4th Ed. (Sydney: O’Connor, Printer, 1867), (DSM/A926.1/B). 187 June 17, 1874, Edward Merewether Private Correspondence No.341, Newcastle City Library Archives A1a. Whatever the dispute, the Quigley’s inherited just over 1,700 acres at Teralba, the western extremity of Awaba Bay, Lake Macquarie. They built a substantial home there, near the existing Booragul High School. Quigley was accidentally killed in March 1879. After Margaret Quigley’s death, their orphaned children went to Quigley relations. P. Jepson comp., K. H. Clouten ed., Teralba: some notes on its early history (Speer’s Point, NSW: Lake Macquarie Shire Council for the Lake Macquarie and District Historical Society, 1967); Dulcie Hartley Collection, Lake Macquarie City Library, 2009. 188 Walker Scott was bankrupted a few years before, and forced to abandon his island ‘Glandville’ (now Ash Island), in Newcastle. Mitchell, Hunter’s River, 60.

191 light of his experience the attractions of a quieter, more reflective pastime – like reading – are easy to see.

192 Chapter Six Cultural action: Giving in Mitchell’s Circle

Stanley Jevons, walking nearby the Mitchell home and forming his social map of Sydney, noted and photographed the underside to the expanding city.1 In New South Wales, all roads led to Sydney, an abnormally large nineteenth century city, virtually doubling every decade and where a third of the population of the colony lived (Appendix 9).2 Considerable poverty became the price of rapid economic growth. The 1861 census showed an increase of just over 95% of alms-people and paupers maintained at public expense.3 Needs of the less fortunate were pressing, with opinion unclear about what to do about this. Amounts needed to provide relief indicate the prevalence of misery. In 1888, nearly £250,000 went from Government to relieve the destitute in Sydney.4 The high standard of living and mobility that immigrants’ handbooks promised escaped many. New models of assistance were needed to offset widespread poverty. By 1873 the customary literature aimed at emigrants promoting opportunities to be found in Australia introduced a new note in their praise. One describes a miner who struck luck, advancing from having £5 in his pocket to owning a Harbour mansion, entering Parliament and becoming a temperance reformer; it was said that his reputation as a philanthropist was more enduring than the success he achieved as a gold miner.5 Those who could, contributed to charitable institutions providing relief. These institutions received considerable amounts. In the late-nineteenth century, English philanthropic bodies received at least £5million annually. This estimate did not count private benevolence and amounts collected by churches.6 Such substantial amounts attracted charity fraud. Indeed, the fourfold increase in pauperism found by the New South Wales Commission into colonial charity, which William Windeyer presided

1 W. S. Jevons, William Stanley Jevons – Photographs 1858, ML M1195. 2 E. C. Fry, ‘The growth of Sydney’ in J. W. McCarty and C. B. Schedvin, eds., Australian Capital Cities, Historical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978), 31.; J. W. McCarty, ‘Australian capital cities in the nineteenth century’ in McCarty and Schedvin, Capital Cities, 13. 3 Census of the Colony of New South Wales taken on the 7th April 1861 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1862), 13. 4 SMH, June 18, 1889, 6-7; ‘Charities’, SMH, January 24, 1888, 6. 5 Charles Robinson, New South Wales the oldest and richest of the Australian Colonies (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1873), 45. 6 Harrison, ‘Philanthropy’, 353.

193 over in 1873-1874, was attributed to too much charity being available.7 Generosity was seen to encourage the growth of pauperism in Sydney and foster a dependency on institutions for welfare support. Since Edward Merewether chaired the 1855 Royal Commission into charitable institutions Mitchell was familiar with these concerns. Building in Sydney also brought these concerns to mind. The 1860s to 1880s saw the first great era of building in Sydney’s city when substantial edifices that advertised colonial advance were erected.8 Throughout these decades shanties alongside larger new structures brought to mind what was left behind. As this chapter will outline, the last two decades of the century called for and fostered new systems and approaches to self-sufficiency. It begins by identifying the climate of need that existed particularly as depression and drought soured the imagined golden future for New South Wales. This climate is discussed in terms of Mitchell’s circle. As the century drew to a close, colonial moral fibre was questioned; national character discussed; and higher objectives beyond built structures – ideas that inspire and guide – were sought. This chapter concludes by reflecting on how an appreciation of colonial history evolved as the past and the future became connected in the lead-up to Federation.

6.1 Meeting Need: Benefaction as a family affair

Occupying pride of place in Mitchell’s home was the portrait of his father painted by English painter Marshall Claxton (1813-1881) in 1854. Prestige stamped the portrait: in the same year Claxton’s A view of Sydney (1853) went to Queen Victoria.9 It was given to her by Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), heir to the Coutts banking wealth and therefore one of the wealthiest English women of her time. Encouraged by Charles Dickens to believe that wealth was to be used responsibly, she lived by the principle of ‘duty to others’, making philanthropy her life profession.

7 Legislative Assembly. New South Wales, Royal Commission on Public Charities (Sydney Infirmary): first report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Working and Management of the Public Charities of the Colony (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1873; New South Wales, Royal Commission on Public Charities: second report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Working and Management of the Public Charities of the Colony (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1874). 8 Fry, ‘The growth of Sydney’, 32. 9 Sir Oliver Millar, The Victorian pictures in the collection of her majesty the queen, vol. 1 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 53–4.

194 It has been pointed out that Victorian philanthropists considered themselves ‘explicitly as “stewards” of the wealth given by the deity’. Paraphrasing Dickens’ argument, John Hamer describes Coutts as believing that her existence depended ‘on a spiritually determined life of service to others in dispensing her wealth’.10 One of the most generous Victorian philanthropists, it is estimated that she gave more than well over £1,000,000.11 Among other causes that she supported, she was a notable friend of the Ragged School Union. She supported its national refuges for destitute children and presided over the ladies working parties of the movement.12 The Ragged School movement was a cooperative volunteer effort providing basic education for vagrant or street children that sprang up in England from 1840s’ reform activism. In 1844 when a group of London Sunday School teachers began the Ragged School Union they found there already existed in London alone at least sixteen similar schools.13 Connection through Claxton’s paintings validated the pride which the Mitchell family held in James Mitchell’s benefactions and service to others. It linked them to the Crown Consort, who before his death in 1861 was respected as ‘a man of wide sympathy and philosophic mind’ under whose auspices philanthropy became fashionable.14 Mitchell had little time for Dickens’ pietist fervour, yet gave to those in need during the thirty years following his parents’ deaths. A culture of giving permeated Sydney society and it is instructive to look at this in terms of Mitchell’s own experience. Beyond prisons, psychiatric hospitals and care for abandoned children, community services in Sydney were generally provided through voluntary payments with Government subsidies matching these. An 1878 prizewinning essay illustrates how extensively charitable institutions were supported in Sydney by voluntary

10 Hamer, ‘English and American Giving’, 449. Owen, Philanthropy, 415-419. For the duty of the privileged to prepare to give an account of their stewardship to the Almighty, see Roberts on Lord Shaftesbury (1801-85) (as below): Roberts, Morals, 182-3. Roberts notes the prominence of bankers in moral reform: 180. 11 Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 21. Cites Owen, Philanthropy, 401, 413-20. 12 Montague, Waifdom, 314. It was known as Lord Ashley’s Ragged School Union because the social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury promoted the free education of destitute children, notably from 1844 through his presidency of the Ragged School Union. 13 Roberts, Morals, 162. 14 Marcus Clarke, The Future Australian Race (Melbourne: A. H. Massina & Co., 1877), 14.

195 donations.15 Among the acknowledgements whom the author singles out in his preface are David Scott’s wife, Maria Scott, alongside others whom Mitchell knew (including former Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Deas Thomson and recently retired chief justice Sir Alfred Stephen). Mitchell’s uncle David Scott initiated a poor-box, which was installed in Sydney’s Central Police Court where he presided for a quarter of a century.16 This supports what historians have shown, that giving was widespread. Giving was not limited to the leisured class or the wealthy. Bethsheeba Ghost (c.1810-1866), Matron at the Sydney Infirmary for twenty years, is one example. A working-class woman who had been transported for receiving stolen goods in 1839 (a year before transportation to New South Wales ended), she bequeathed the Infirmary £100, the equivalent of her salary for a year.17 In reviewing the history of Australia’s third sector, Mark Lyons found the existence of a strong commitment to establish and maintain private charitable initiatives providing health, social services and recreational opportunities. He found that sectarianism encouraged this commitment, but a strong tradition of cooperatives and mutual support bodies existed nonetheless.18 The Good Samaritan principle was embedded in the community and generally supported the colonial welfare system.19 Giving was necessary. In April 1860 Henry Parkes chaired a select committee of the New South Wales parliament that investigated the condition of the working classes of Sydney.20 This found that Sydney was infested by vagrant children and revelations of juvenile depravity appalled. The distressing conditions that were

15 Brooks, Charity and Philanthropy: This was written competitively in response to prize money offered for the best essay written on the subject.; Lyons, Third Sector, 100. 16 The local police were significant distributors of relief in many rural areas: Stephen Garton, ‘Rights and Duties, Arguing charity and welfare 1880-1920’, in Michael Wearing & Rosemary Berreen eds. Welfare and Social Policy in Australia: the Distribution of Advantage, (Sydney: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 28. 17 Judith Godden, ‘Bathsheba Ghost, Matron of the Sydney Infirmary 1852-66: A Silenced Life’, Labour History, No. 87 (November 2004), 52-4. 18 Lyons, Third Sector, 99. 19 Contributions in kind were also given, as noted in reference to the City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen: Legislative Assembly. New South Wales. Third Report of the Royal Commission on Public Charities (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1899). xxviii.; On such help from the clergy (namely from Mitchell’s Rusden relatives, and in particular from Saranna’s mother Anne and sister Georgianna), see Curthoys, ‘Churches’, 40-41. In South Australia a group serving a similar function to the COS was called the Strangers' Friend: Kennedy, Charity warfare, 78-92. 20 ‘The Working Classes of Sydney’, Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis New South Wales, Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1859-60, vol. lV, 1270-2. In Frank Crowley (ed.) A Documentary History of Australia Vol. 2 Colonial Australia 1841-1874 (West Melbourne, VIC: Nelson, 1980), 411.

196 described were far from the new order that was foreseen for Sydney by 1820s settlers like the Scotts, who arrived with Sir Joseph Banks’ anticipation of exemplary colonial advance. Instead, it appeared that the sins of the old world (what the committee termed ‘criminal abnormalities’) were being reproduced in Sydney, despite its ‘mechanics’ being found to be in the main ‘a credit to the country’. Government maladministration was blamed for the prevailing distress. Mutual-help and self-sufficiency was the model in Sydney. Insight into this comes from Edinburgh-trained doctor, Robert Scott Skirving (1859-1956). Arriving in 1883, his observations come with a fresh (albeit self-interested) eye. Skirving was an honorary physician at Prince Alfred Hospital (1889-1911), senior surgeon at St. Vincent’s Hospital (1889-1923), and also ran a busy private medical practice. Skirving (who sought to become indispensible to the social elite) was in high demand; years of medical service familiarised him with voluntarist community attitudes. Skirving reflected on views held in Sydney about self-sufficiency, where dependency was dreaded. ‘The tradition of honest work still persisted [in New South Wales] and the necessities of life were cheap. Any one who was sober, industrious and honest could earn and save enough money to prevent himself becoming a burden on the State.’21 Fears were held in the colony about the dependency that England’s poor laws were seen to generate among those in England who were accustomed to take advantage of alms and doles, legal relief and hospital succour. Example of this came from an English man, who was recommended to immigrate to Australia in 1882. He refused, ‘You won’t catch me going to a country where there is no poor law and no union works-house for a cove to fall back on.’22 Stephen Garton’s account of welfare at the time supports the apprehension that colonists held over poor relief. Migrants to New South Wales were anxious to avoid the ‘horrors’ of welfare strictures in Britain (with harsh workhouses and intrusive work tests to determine eligibility for relief).23

21 Robert Scott-Skirving, ‘Memoirs’, Vol. 2, 101. ML 571/56 No. 4(5). 22 J. S. London, ‘Pictures of Travel’, Argus, September 16, 18, 4. 23 Stephen Garton, ‘Rights’, 26. By the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834 in England the only relief for the destitute but able-bodied was care in workhouses under conditions inferior to those of the humblest labourer outside. From a historian’s perspective the nearest we can get to contemporaneous views about this, see R. H. Tawney, ‘The Theory of Pauperism’, Sociological Review II, (1909), 367. Recent historians see English poor laws as a consequence rather than cause of social ills afflicting English society. See, G. Boyer, ‘The old poor law and the agricultural labour market in southern England. An empirical analysis’, Journal of Economic History XLVI, (1986), 419-30.

197 To most, Australia represented opportunity for a better life; reaching it emigrants were confident they would achieve the success that immigrants’ guides to the Antipodean world promoted. Yet not every labouring man found the Australian colonies were the Eden that guides promised. Centralizing systems of communication and transportation saw the coastal cities – particularly Sydney and Melbourne – absorb two-thirds of Australia’s population by the 1890s. Labour unrest simmered during the previous decade. Prolonged drought in New South Wales for the eight years from 1879 exacerbated hardship. In 1882 wharf labourers were the first group to strike. By May 1884, the rising number of unemployed led the government in New South Wales to institute public work schemes. In May 1886, two thousand unemployed men assembled at the office of the Minister of Works soliciting employment; they were given the task of clearing public lands. Soup kitchens were set up. Dependency on aid rose fourfold in the decade to 1886. The frequency into the 1890s of Royal Commission reports into charitable assistance reflects the scale of the problem.24 However, reports found that the amount of ready assistance given encouraged pauperism. Loafers need not work if they could easily gain free quarters and food at the public expense. Conservative reaction set in and dependence on assistance was seen to result in indolence, thriftlessness, reckless living, gambling and vice. Moreover, increasing pauperism in Sydney was seen as a social blot. As had been the case earlier in the century, benefaction was viewed as a form of social insurance and essential to law and order. Deprivation in one of the richest countries in the world was astonishing. Social ills in the midst of colonial wealth were shocking. Observers noted that ‘paupers, vagrants, criminals, trade depressions, strikes, lock-outs, class antagonism, larrikinism, and other social disorders [are] incongruous with our liberal institutions and wonderful material progress.’25 Children suffered most, with many abandoned from birth. The number of street children rose. It was necessary to ensure the indigent young could develop employment skills rather than criminal tendencies. Public order

24 Legislative Assembly. New South Wales. Report of the Royal Commission appointed to make a diligent and full Inquiry into and Report upon the methods of carrying on Government Charitable Institutions (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1898). 25 Frank M. Bladen, The Growth of the Australasian colonies and their Present Relation to the Mother Country, (Sydney: J. L. Holmes & Co, Printer, 1886), 16.

198 was a problem. There was talk that juvenile offenders might be transported to Lord Howe Island.26 Providing education was thought necessary to counter rising pauperism; Henry Parkes’s Public Instruction Act was passed in February 1880. Effective from the start of 1883, this provided for the withdrawal of all state aid to Church schools, full state responsibility for primary education and the establishment of government high schools. Individuals lent their assistance where needed. Saranna Scott gave books to the University (along with Sir Charles Nicholson).27 Mitchell supported the Ragged Schools, an organization founded to remedy the problem of child destitution and distress. The Sussex Street Ragged and Industrial School, established in 1860, is generally considered to be the first in Sydney to cater to neglected children. This overlooks the Ragged School that John Grylls ran at Millers Point more than a decade before (as discussed earlier).28 The link to example from his former teacher aside, features of the Ragged School movement point to Mitchell’s outlook. John Ramsland, historian of the Ragged School Movement in New South Wales, distinguished it for being more idealistic when compared to other voluntary charitable organizations. Significantly, it had ‘a much less pessimistic view of lower- class culture and its capacity for self-improvement.’29 The movement was supported by small businessmen and merchants rather than elite notables of colonial society. Ramsland describes them as motivated ‘by a deep sense of Christian duty and love towards impoverished humanity, and a strong religious zeal to reform what was, in their view, a corrupt, harsh and unfeeling society.’ He sees them as men ‘who fervently believed in the liberating doctrine of self-improvement and the reforming influences of the combination of education and religion.’30 Furthermore, children were not removed from their environment; the intention was to bring change and improvement to them within their family and neighbourhood. Ramsland identifies the Ragged Schools as the only important colonial example of a ‘partial’ institution (with children remaining with their families), unlike the ‘total’ institution approach (which

26 R. A. Armstrong to Parkes May 7, 1886, MLA919, 150. 27 SMH, July 8, 1887, 5 28 See chapter 4, 119-120. Grylls gave night classes for working men. 29 Ramsland, Backlanes, 71. 30 Ramsland, Backlanes, 227, 230.

199 removed children from their parents) of other voluntary organizations.31 The Ragged School movement took the view that prevention was better than cure; it embraced the working classes to build incentives for self-improvement and to attack poverty.32 Mitchell supported Sydney’s four Ragged Schools as a regular long-term subscriber. He also supported the Institution for the Blind and Deaf, and the City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen in Kent Street.33 The press reported that more than 7,300 separate individuals received assistance from this charity during 1886.34 Financial crisis in the 1890s hit home the depth of need in Sydney. Correspondence to Mitchell shows that he was familiar with the deep-seated need. Penury and misery befell people whom he knew. Calls on his charity were made and met. Among funds he contributed to was one raised to assist the widow of John Kinloch, for many years the University’s Esquire Bedell.35 Another call appealed to Mitchell’s ‘kind and cultured nature’, asking him to buy statuary by Italian-born sculptor Giovanni Giuseppe Fontana (1821-1893). Fontana attracted attention with his sculpture at the Garden Palace and Sydney Town Hall, and with his bronze statue of Dr. John Dunmore Lang (1890) in Wynyard Park. The letter writer hoped to sell the statuary he owned. He pleaded that this was his only means to raise funds needed to recover the health of his sons, both students at the University, who were afflicted with respiratory illness.36 Mitchell promised he would inspect the statues. As a land-lord Mitchell most likely received requests similar to that which came to his brother-in-law. A mayoral deputation from Newcastle asked Edward Merewether to reduce rents that leaseholders owed on Newcastle’s Burwood Estate (formerly owned by James Mitchell) on account of the long continued depression.37 In all likelihood, other calls for help came to Mitchell. Only his

31 Ramsland, Backlanes, 230. 32 In keeping with James Mitchell’s philosophy and practice: Ramsland, Backlanes, 106-7. 33 Ragged and Industrial School (Sydney, NSW), Annual Report of the Sussex Street Ragged and Industrial School, Sydney (Sydney: Printed by W.H. Buzacott, 1878, 1879) (DSM/042/P519); ‘Sydney Ragged School’, SMH, January 11,1877, 2; SMH January 10, 1882, 2; City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen, Annual report of the City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen (Sydney: Lee & Ross, 1879 through 1894) (DSM/ 042/ P259); ‘City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen’, SMH, October 4, 1887, 9; Industrial Blind Institution, To Sir Alfred Stephen: President of the Institution from its Foundation in Commemoration of the 90th Anniversary of his Birthday from the Committees of the Industrial Blind Institution, Sydney 20 August 1892 (Sydney: Blind Institution, 1892) (DSM/ F362.4/). 34 ‘Our Public Charities ll’, SMH, March 26, 1888, 3. 35 Rev. P. Backhouse to Mitchell, June 20, 1898, June 22, 1898, ML MSSA1461/136. 36 November 10, 1898, ML MSS A1461/166-7. 37 R. J. Jury to E. C. Merewether, August 17, 1893, Merewether Estate Archives, A3a.

200 correspondence for 1895 survives and the number of requests suggest they may have been a frequent occurrence. Cases that the Charity Organization Society (COS) handled in Sydney reflected the level of need that existed. An example of ‘moral reform voluntarism’ that typified the Victorian era, the COS was begun in England by a prominent group of ‘volunteer moral disciplinarians’ that emerged from the Social Science Association in 1868-9.38 Branches in Australia followed, with Professor Edward Morris (whom Mitchell knew) founding president.39 In Sydney over 4,300 children were assisted during 1888 and 1889 alone.40 In 1892 the Society received close to 3,500 applications for help. Many of Robert Scott Skirving’s medical patients came from the small circles of ‘old society’ in Sydney that Mitchell sprang from. Skirving respected them, ‘Many of these people constituted a kind of real Colonial Aristocracy – of brains, ability and sometimes of good birth. They, or their fathers had been pioneers, and I think deserved most of what they possessed in wealth and social standing.’41 He thought most of them lost money when depression in the 1890s ‘struck hard on everybody’. It reduced individuals – who were in a station at one time to bestow charity – to needing to receive it. Later studies on Australian wealth support Skirving’s opinion. From the beginnings of Australian probate valuations in 1819 until 1939, only seven millionaire estates were left in New South Wales and nine in Victoria.42 Women were particularly hard hit through the difficult times of the 1890s. Mitchell’s friend Alice Stephen, fifty-four year old spinster and one of Sir Alfred Stephen’s twin daughters, asked him to lend £5 to a friend they knew. ‘We have known her and her sisters for a great many years; and it is always the same sad story with them of perpetual struggle with poverty, ill-health and misfortune.’43 The woman

38 M. Roberts, ‘Charity Disestablished? The Origins of the Charity Organization Society Revisited, 1868-1871’, Journal of Eccleciastical History, 54 (2002), 42-50. Roberts, Morals, 209, 276-7. 39 Morris presided over the first two Australian Conferences on Charity in 1891-92: Proceedings of the Second Australasian Conference on Charity, held in Melbourne, from 17th to 21st November, 1891, convened by the Charity Organization Society of Melbourne (Melbourne: R.S. Brain, Government Printer, 1892) (DSM/361/A). 40 The Charity Organization & Relief Society, Eleventh Annual Report, (Sydney: Gibbs, Shallard & Co., 1889), 1; idem, Twenty-first Annual Report (Sydney: The Society, 1899), 5. 41 Robert Scot Skirving, Memoirs, Vol. 2, 159, Skirving Papers, Miscellaneous ML 571/56 Box 2(5). 42 William D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth’, In Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), online 2010 http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t127.e1541 (accessed March 14, 2010). 43 Alice Stephen to Mitchell, November 29, 1898, ML MSSA1461/162; December 3, 1898, ML MSS A1461/165; Rose Scott received financial assistance from George Rusden: Allen, Scott, 101.

201 concerned lost her chances for employment as a nurse from lacking the £5 needed to rent a telephone by which doctors could reach her. As Stephen reminded Mitchell, the woman and her sisters had known better days so their piteous position was all the harder to bear. This difficulty struck close to home when Edward Wise’s niece, Emily Heron (to whom Mitchell had been engaged in 1865) faced struggle. By the 1880s, Heron was an established writer and one of the first female journalists. Her articles regularly appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News, Sydney Mail, The Centennial Magazine and included editorials in the Sydney Morning Herald.44 She was associate editor of the Illustrated Sydney Herald from 1889. In 1886, when her husband, solicitor Henry Heron was declared insolvent after embezzling over £90,000, Mitchell took on the cost of educating her eldest son and daughter.45 He continued to do so after Emily Heron’s untimely death at 45 in August 1890. Heron’s success reflected the advances that women were making. The 1881 census showed an increase of women in the population of New South Wales since 1861 of 49%.46 The intense economic difficulties of the 1890s left many women reduced to pitiful circumstances. Financial exigencies led them to seek independence. Middle class women hit hard became intent on improving their position and redressing prejudice against women working. Those who could sought to change their position. Suffragism matched womens’ desires for education so they may increase their vocational opportunity and attain economic independence. The Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society (formed in 1884) was followed by suffragist bodies in all the Australian colonies. The suffrage movement came late to New South Wales where it began in 1891. William Manning acknowledged and followed the lead taken in the

44 She wrote under several pen names, one being ‘Australie’. She also wrote book reviews: Australie, ‘Review of ‘Love & Life’ by C. M. Yonge’, The Sydney Mail vol.XXXl no.1078 New Series, March 5, 1881, 365. For biographical details on Heron see Patricia Clarke, ‘Australie’: Emily Manning: An Australian Born Journalist, Poet and Novelist’ in Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (North Sydney, N. S. W.: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 113-116; Elizabeth Webby, ‘Born to Blush Unseen: Some Nineteenth Century Women Poets’ in Debra Adelaide, A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988), 41-52; Adrian Mitchell, ‘No new thing: The concept of novelty and early Australian writing’ in F. H. Mares and P. R. Eaden, Mapped but not known: The Australian landscape of the imagination: Essays and poems presented to Brian Elliott (Netley, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1986), 52-63. 45 ‘Intercolonial’, BC, January 1, 1886, 5. Heron avoided the case reaching the insolvency court. 46 New South Wales, Census of 1871 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1873), Part 5 Social Condition, 646. The total population was 503,981, of whom 275,551 were males and 228,430 females. The increase in female population since 1861 was just over 43%. By the 1881 census the increase in female population was 49%.

202 Northern Hemisphere from 1848 giving women admission to higher education.47 When the University of Sydney Senate determined in mid-1881 that the University would be equally open to women as to men, this encouraged Thomas Walker to give the University £5000 (matching the sum publicly sought by Manning earlier that year in order to establish a College for women).48 Walker stipulated that his donation go to bursaries of which a large portion should assist female students.49 From the 1880s, Mitchell’s cousin Rose Scott gave Mitchell plenty of occasion to reflect on issues of reform and philanthropy. He ‘regarded her with more affection than anyone else’), and she played a central role in suffrage endeavours.50 In 1879, at the age of thirty-three, she was left with an annual inheritance from Helenus Scott of £500. She moved to Sydney with her widowed mother Saranna, and her nephew, Helenus (‘Nene’) Hope Scott Wallace (1878-1951), whom she raised and later adopted.51 Scott’s wide intellectual interests were better suited to a larger centre than Newcastle. Her first article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1889 and she became a prominent public figure.52 Scott was part of the Sydney Women’s Literary Society (formed in 1890) and the Australasian Home Reader Union (1892- 1897), from which stemmed a network of women advocating womens’ interests.53 Scott put unremitting efforts into the suffrage cause as secretary of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales formed in May 1891. When the Woman’s Suffrage Act was passed by Parliament in 1902, the League was dissolved. The Women’s Political Educational League was then formed and Scott became its president. Various sections of society were vigorously clamouring for reform. Disgruntled workers pressed for change following the industrial unrest of 1890-1891 and middle-class men and women criticised social institutions and questioned aspects

47 ‘The Triumphs of Women’, The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 19 April 1884, 21 48 ‘The proposed college for women’, Letter to the editor, The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser 7 June 1887, 2 49 ‘The University of Sydney, public letter’, SMH, 22 July 1881, 3. 50 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 22. 51 Born to Rose’s sister Augusta Maria ‘Gussie’ Scott and Edward Hope Wallace. His mother died in 1880. 52 On teaching children: ‘Home Lessons’, SMH, April 20, 1889, 6.; Also see ‘Rose Scott. An Appreciation’, SMH, April 27, 1925, 5. 53 Lyons and Arnold, History, 386. Edward Ellis Morris edited the Australasian Home Reader in the 1890s.

203 of public policy.54 Scott was primarily concerned with reforms to improve conditions for women and children. Her work led to legislation that removed discrimination against females and that benefitted minors. She was involved with the Prisoners’ Aid Society, the appointment of gaol matrons, the establishment of children’s courts, the Children’s Protection Act (1892), Custody of Children Act (1894), and the Early Closing Act (1899).55 She worked on non-party lines and declined to enter party politics. Articulate, always stylishly groomed, Scott was an impressive personality. As the Brisbane Courier described her, she was something of a force of nature and impossible to resist.56 Elsewhere she was called ‘the Rose without the thorn’; and is remembered as the ‘mother’ of women’s suffrage in Australia.57 From Melbourne, the Argus noted that she led ‘in those circles of society where worth and culture counted for more than material possessions’.58 She was among those who led as Victorian philanthropy evolved into public policy. Mitchell followed Scott’s public work closely; his bookplate appears on copies of the Australasian Home Reader Union’s journal from its first volume through 1894. From 1885, she lived with Saranna at the Edgecliff end of the eastern suburb of Woollahra, bordering Mitchell’s suburb of Darlinghurst. Her home was a setting for her collection of Australiana and became a notable gathering point for writers, politicians, artists, journalists, and international celebrities visiting Sydney like English socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb.59 Signatures in her visitors’ book indicate the range of her sympathies and acquaintances. Signatures that it bears include those from Sydney-born poet Roderic Quinn (1869-1949); journalist and

54 That a new social contract needed to be forged, and that Government should play a greater role in providing essential services, is covered by Garton, ‘Rights’, 31-2, 34-6. 55 W. E. Murphy, History of the eight hours' movement: (Under patronage of the pioneers of the Eight Hours' System and the officers and members of the Eight Hours' Anniversary Committee, 1896) (Melbourne: Spectator, 1896-1900) (DSM/331.81/6A1). 56 ‘Rose Scott’, BC, May 19, 1894, 5. 57 N. G. Butlin ‘The lfe and times of the Australian economist 1888-1898’ in The Australian Economist 1888-1898 ed. N. G. Butlin, E. M. Fitzgerald, R. H. Scott (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1986) vol. 1, xiii; W. Pidduck, International Women’s Suffrage Correspondence of Rose Scott (1847-1925), Part 1, Scott Family Papers c.1790-1924 with Papers of the Rusden Family 1834-1898, ML MSSA2260-2284. 58 ‘Notes from Sydney’, Argus, 24, 1925, 14. 59 Untitled clipping, June 19, 1898. Eldridge ML MSS6318. Sidney and Beatrice Webb were in Australia between September and November that year. Rose Scott is not mentioned in their Australian diary, although Mitchell is: A. G. Austin, The Webbs’Australian Diary 1898 (Melbourne: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., 1965), 49.

204 popular Bulletin balladist Victor James Daley (1858-1905); freelance journalist and future South Australian Labor Premier Crawford Vaughan (1874-1947); British-born, Melbourne-based, former Christian Socialist, and Socialist journalist and tactician to the women’s movement, Hyde Champion (1859-1928); Roumanian Prima Donna Alexia Bassian (1876-1948); suffragists Catherine Spence (1825-1910) and Vida Goldstein (1869-1949); bohemian sculptor Nelson Illingworth (1862-1926); painter E. Phillips Fox (1865-1915); Federation advocate and former attorney-general (and cousin of Emily Heron) Bernard Ringrose Wise (1858-1916); and radical and Australian Socialist League member May Hickman (1875-1956).60 Mitchell’s influence on Scott has been overlooked in discussion about her, as his grandmother’s blue-stocking acquaintances have not been appreciated.61 Mitchell knew how salons like those of the gifted Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (1732-1776) and Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777) could make (and unmake) reputations and influence ideas. He admired Voltaire, who long enjoyed the protection of the Duchesse of Maine (1676-1753). He was steeped in John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861) and The Subjection of Women (1869). He was attached to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, respecting her concern with women’s struggle for integrity and self-sufficiency. Brontë herself wrote that she desired to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question.62 While Victorian guardians of public morality saw Jane Eyre’s individualism and rebellion against authority as subversive, Mitchell admired Brontë’s celebration in Shirley (1849) of women’s rights to self-respecting work. He was widely read on social ethics, sexual ethics, and women’s social conditions. His reading suggests he was sympathetic to his cousin’s views (apart from her resistance to Federation owing to its failing to improve the

60 Rose Scott Address Book and Notebooks, ML MSS38/22WL; John Barnes, Socialist Champion, Portrait of the gentleman as Crusader (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006), 225. Rose Scott was adroit at maintaining relationship with the important and the powerful. B. R. Wise was the son of Mr. Justice Wise (whose Australiana collection was bequeathed to the Public Library of New South Wales in 1865). On Wise see chapter 5, p. 167, 176-177. 61 Allen saw the start of Rose’s salon ‘as the legacy of her male relatives’: Allen, Scott, 67, 76. 62 Christine Alexander, ‘Brontë, Charlotte (1816–1855)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3523 (accessed 1 Sept 2011); Thomas Wise and John Alexander Symingtron, The Brontes: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932/1980), 2:215-6. The naturally studious Bronte was widely respected in her day, admired for how self-improvement was her driving force.

205 position for women) and could have influenced her direction.63 She sent him greeting cards, and he lent his books to her, such as de Scudery’s The Female Orators (1728) on illustrious women who ‘set forth in their undaunted defences and noble resolutions.’64 She could have read his copies of Paul Belouino’s Le Femme (1845/1865), and philosopher Jules Simon’s Le Femme du Vingtième Siècle (1892). They undoubtedly discussed Women in Social Life, the transactions from the International Congress of Women held in mid-1899. Both followed community calls for temperance, the protection of girls and legislative repression of vice. Both were interested in preventive work, particularly in prison. Many in Mitchell’s immediate circle possessed a strong sense of social responsibility. Private philanthropy responds to progressive industrialism in the novella Pearl and Willie (1880) written by his aunt Maria Scott (who was noted for her charitable efforts).65 Ostensibly a tale told with a view to expressing the tenderness of feeling which may exist between siblings, Pearl’s life is altered when her brother Willie dies. She must now live not ‘for one alone’ but ‘among her fellow creatures in full sympathy with them’ and ‘create higher aspirations in others’. She must ‘work for humanity faithfully, believing that, when death comes, someone else will take up the theme when she left off’. Pearl’s thoughts expressed the generally held view about philanthropy as ‘living for others’, a view that was practised in Mitchell’s circle.66 To Rose Scott each individual ‘was called upon to help another life with his or her life’.67 That this was a common view among family members is clear from those who were working in the ‘common cause’.68 Scott’s aunt, Rose Selwyn, was a founder of the Newcastle branch of the Girls’ Friendly Society, which found employment situations (generally in domestic service) for unaccompanied immigrant teenage girls

63 In the lead-up to Federation Scott was prominent in the Colonist’s Anti-Convention Bill League because she believed the proposed Constitution would be damaging to women. See, Helen Irving, The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 83. 64 Scott to Mitchell, ML MSS 379/Box4, No. 3. Scott and Mitchell were conscious of the irony of their positions: she worked in the world of affairs beyond the home, and was active in public life, while he kept out of public life and worked within his home. 65 Spray, Pearl and Willie: A Tale (Sydney: John Woods, 1880), 26-7 (DSM/A823/S). 66 On “living for others”: Robert Green Ingersoll, The Three Philanthropists (Melbourne: E W Cole, 1890). 67 ‘National Council of Women’, SMH, November 19, 1898, 4. 68 On working in the ‘common cause’, see Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 45–46.

206 (and continues operating today).69 Maria and David Scott established the Lisgar Training School in Darlinghurst, where pre-adolescent girls were boarded and instructed in domestic skills that would earn them future employment.70 It was established by subscription, managed by a voluntary ladies’ committee, supervised by Maria Scott, and ultimately housed in a three-storey building erected on David Scott’s Darlinghurst property, costing £200. It did not receive state support. Philanthropic activity opened the doors of public life to women in Mitchell’s circle. It expanded their activity, extending it into public life. Sister of the engineer Norman Selfe (1839-1911), whom Mitchell knew, was the educationalist Maybanke Wolstenholme (later Anderson) (1845-1927). She worked with Rose Scott, and was General Secretary of the Home Reading Union. An inspiring teacher, she began a progressive school, Maybanke College in Dulwich Hill (1884-1898). When the Womanhood Suffrage League was established in May 1891, she was its vice president, then President for three years from 1893. Connections among like-minded activists have been stressed by historians of late eighteenth century blue-stockings, and of mid-century Langham Place and turn-of the-century Bloomsbury circles.71 Likewise with circles in Sydney. The Womanhood Suffrage League’s foundation president, Mary Windeyer (1837-1912), was wife of Mitchell’s friend from university days William Windeyer. The Windeyers were a force in charitable endeavours. Mary Windeyer’s efforts to remove children from orphanages into a boarding-out system of foster care was so successful following a year’s experiment in 1879 that she forced the government into change away from institutionalising children.72 She organized the Exhibition of Women's Industries and

69 The Girls’ Friendly Society was begun in England in 1875. See, Agnes L. Money, comp. History of the Girls’ Freindly Society (London: Wells, Gardner & Darton Co., 1911). Girls’ Friendly Society: www.gfsusa.org/; Anne O’Brien, ‘Anglicanism and Gender Issues’ in Bruce Kaye, General editor, Anglicanism in Australia, A History (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 278. 70 Also known as the Lisgar Protestant Orphan School.; Brooks, Charity, 1878, 15-16.; Ramsland, Back Lanes, 103-4, 172, 182. 71 Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 94-101. Based at 19 Langham Place were the offices of the English Woman’s Journal. Caine shows that this base also offered a social network for mid-Victorian feminists like Maria Rye and middle-class women who were discontented with their position (including Emily Manning when she was in London). The Langham Place women also worked closely with the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS). 72 She maintained her advocacy for children. In 1896, responding to the rapid rate of increase in the numbers of destitute children shown in the statistics which she presented, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote ‘it seems difficult to believe that in a population like ours the number of really destitute children

207 Centenary Fair in 1888; takings from sales of work financed the Temporary Aid Society, which lent money to women suffering financial difficulties. She was behind a program of reforms to benefit women that encompassed higher education, expanded employment opportunities (especially in the professions), improved hospital facilities, and political rights. She convinced where many failed.73 She was prominent in the fight to win votes for women; when she resigned from the Womanhood Suffrage League she convened the franchise department of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (the largest social reform movement of the nineteenth century).74 Maybanke Anderson’s biographer noted that the links of friendship between individuals in Anderson’s circle and their families cannot be overestimated.75 She describes the closeness that existed among family and social circles and which escaped the public eye. She describes the regular exchanges they had over their concerns with the state of affairs around them.76 Literature was often central to their exchange. Arthur Selwyn shared and discussed books with Saranna to whom he was deeply attached (like Mitchell was).77 Drawn into Rose Scott’s orbit were men like John Mildred Creed (1842- 1930), poet and journalist John Farrell (1851-1904) and politician Francis (Frank) Cotton (1857-1942). Their activism represented the shifting sentiments of the agitated times.78 Social reformer John Mildred Creed, formerly resident physician at the Sydney Infirmary (1867), returned to Sydney in 1882 from medical practice in Scone, and established a medical practice in Woollahra. Editor of the Australasian Medical Gazette (1882-93), and honorary surgeon at Sydney Hospital (1883), Creed became secretary (1883-1886) then president (1887-1892) to the NSW branch of the British Medical Association. Creed was particularly concerned with child health and he supported Scott’s work for the Children’s Protection Bill. Rose Scott and those in her circle were intent on bettering the future.

should be so great’. Mary Elizabeth Windeyer Holograph letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, ML A.W.77/15. 73 Letter from Lady Windeyer to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald concerning the boarding out system for children, 5 May 1896,Papers relating to Sir William Charles Windeyer, 23 February 1849-1900 ML MSS Aw 77/15; SMH, May 5, 1896, 4. 74 Photograph Lady Windeyer, RAHS photographs of individuals 1865-1916. ML Pic.Acc.2039/Box 9. 75 Roberts, Maybanke Anderson, 101. 76 See chapter 3, 88-9. 77 Selwyn, Letters of the Late Dean Selwyn, 1902, 42, 51, 79. Selwyn named Saranna ‘Madre’. 78 Allen, Scott, 76, 79. On Cotton see Bede Nairn, Civilizing Capitalism: The Labour Movement in New South Wales 1870-1900, (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 41.

208

6.2 Weighing up inequality and call to action Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, said that sympathy was integral to the propertied ‘man of virtue’; it was achieved through the experience of interacting with others, either through social converse or reading.79 Mitchell’s choice of reading shows that he gave thought to concerns that those in his circle held about the future. He read the work of the French utopian writer and cooperator Charles Fourier (1772– 1837). He read Political economy (1854) by the British economist and essayist Nassau (William) Senior (1790-1864), president of the education section of the Social Science Association (a seed-bed for the propagation of new moral reform causes – as it was for the COS) and on the Poor Law Commission.80 He read essays by educational reformer and Dublin Archbishop Richard Whately (formerly professor of political economy at Oxford (1829-31)). He was familiar with The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1821-6) by the Scottish political economist Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), whose solution to urban deprivation was to revive the traditional parish system in the city and provide popular education.81 He read sociological studies including John M. Robertson’s Modern Humanists (1891), containing essays on Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Among the titles which Mitchell owned were Emerson’s The Conduct of Life (1860), Jan de Liefde’s Six Months Among the Charities of Europe (1865), and Anne Mozley’s Essays on Social Subjects (1865). Dutch Mennonite pietist Jan de Liefde (1814-1869) took a special interest in the poor and began an organization called For the welfare of the People, the object of which was to raise the social and economic level of the very destitute.82

79 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 112-13, 159-60. 80 Roberts, Morals, 199. On the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science see L. Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain. The Social Science Association 1857- 1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 81 In 1820, Chalmers was minister of Glasgow’s largest and poorest parish. At the time Scotland levied no taxes for poor relief, relying instead on donations collected at church doors. Chalmers demonstrated that country charity could be as systematic and uncompromising in dealing with the poor as a tax-supported system of relief. Chalmers’ method of parish districts supervised by laymen prefigured the COS. 82 Christian Neff, “Liefde, Jan de (1814-1869).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1957, http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/liefde_jan_de_1814_1869 (accessed April 4, 2009).

209 Besides reading the report of the Commission appointed to inquire into colonial public charities (1874), he read other reports including those of the Sydney City Mission (opened in 1863); the Commissioners for Administering the Laws for Relief of the Poor in Ireland (1855-1856); the Australasian Sanitary Conferences of Sydney (1884); and a report on communicable and infectious diseases read before the Inter-colonial Medical Congress at Melbourne in January 1889. He read on public health, public health laws and the legal and social aspects of prostitution. This took him to read Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet (1790-1836), the most widely read author on prostitution. He also read Nottinghill evangelist and touring preacher Henry Varley (1835-1912); French liberal politician and economist Yves Guyot (1843-1928); and English medical activists William John Acton (1812-1875) and Charles Bell Taylor (1829-1909). Mitchell read widely on crime, suggesting that he gave thought to investigating crime as a social problem. His reading on crime spanned the early libertarian Dominique Georges Frédéric de Pradt, Archbishop of Mechlin (1759- 1837), who wrote on Spanish colonialism in South America; Glaswegian magistrate, and founder of Thames Police, Patrick Culquhoun’s (1745-1820) treatise on London police (1797); and Alexandre Dumas’ eight volumed case studies Crimes célèbres (1841). He picked up pamphlets like that titled What Shall We Do with our Criminals? (1857). He read reports of London’s Howard Association, following the Association’s prison congress of July 1872.83 He read Brooklyn-based, celebrated American Presbyterian preacher and crusader against crime and vice, the Rev. Thomas de Witt Talmage (1832-1902). English biographer and literary scholar Thomas Seccombe’s (1866-1923) Lives of Twelve Bad Men (1894) was in Mitchell’s library. He read The Man of Genius (1891) and The Female Offender (1895), both written by early criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). It has been argued that middle-class philanthropists had little understanding of ‘the broader circumstances underlying the plight of the poor’ and that middle -class prejudices even saw charity as a means of ruling-class oppression.84 Mitchell’s

83 Howard Association, Howard Association Report (London: Howard Association, 1875) (DSM/042/P515); Howard Association, Howard Association Report (London: Howard Association, 1891) (DSM/042/P515). The Howard Association became the Howard League in 1921. John Howard’s name become synonymous with philanthropy: it represented universal mercy, worldwide sympathy, and absolute consecration to human service. See Bremer Giving, 78. 84 Garton, ‘Rights’, 27; Also, Dickey, No Charity There.

210 sustained reading suggests otherwise. There is a pattern to his reading: titles he owned on the pressing social issues of the day indicate more than idle curiosity about these issues. Their frequency and range suggests he thought deeply about these issues. They suggest that, like his cousin Rose Scott, he sought to understand the issues of assistance and state-welfare from genuine concern. Mitchell’s reading suggests that, like Rose, he was particularly concerned with the plight of the destitute. Hands-on active involvement with the needy from within his family circle over many years fuelled his empathy. Like many Victorians, Mitchell and Scott were both familiar with literary representations of philanthropy, such as in the figures of Martha Maxwell in Frances Trollope’s Jessie Philips (1843) and Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874).85 They were also familiar with practical examples. Their families knew well the work of Caroline Chisholm (1808-1877), who set up her Female Immigrants’ Home in the old immigration barracks in Sydney in 1841, run entirely on public subscription. Francis Merewether was appointed Sydney Immigration Agent in 1841 and worked with Chisholm, who coined the phrase ‘the eye of a Merewether’, referring to how nothing escaped his attention.86 Mitchell and Scott were also familiar with the work of Florence Nightingale (herself influenced by Chisholm).87 Structural changes that were needed were widespread. Mitchell discussed and weighed up ideas for reform with the London-born, Sydney-based lawyer Alfred de Lissa (1838-1913), to whom Mitchell lent his books.88 De Lissa was a member of the Australian Economic Association formed in 1887. Among the more than 200 members of the Association were many whom Mitchell knew including George

85 George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874 (Edinburgh: Williams Blackwood, 1874) (DSM/823.88/11D1); Frances Milton Trollope, Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (London: Henry Colburn, 1844) (DSM/823.79/T). 86 Rodney Stinson, Unfeigned love, Historical accounts of Caroline Chisholm and her work (Sydney: Yorkcross, 2008), 33, 34, 48.; Mary Hoban, Fifty-one pieces of wedding cake; a biography of Caroline Chisholm (Kilmore, Vic.: Lowden Publishing, 1973), 48, 55, 66, 71, 92-3. 87 Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend (London: Viking, 2008), 325, 484. The Nightingale system of nursing was brought to Sydney Hospital with the arrival in Sydney in 1868 of Nightingale-trained nurse Lucy Osburn (1835-1891) with five trained nurses. 88 Alfred De Lissa, Production, Distribution and Quesnay’s Tableau économique (Sydney: McCaron Stewart & Co, 1896) (DSM/042/P91). A mathematician, De Lissa sought to adapt François Quesnay’s Tableau économique to Australian circumstances. Mitchell was already familiar with De Lissa’s proposal, having read De Lissa’s earlier works.

211 Barton, P. G. King, John Farrell and John Plummer.89 A specialist in company law and pioneer of macro-economics, de Lissa urged financial reform. Following the collapse of building societies, land companies, banks and other financial institutions, his views received a wide airing including by the Institute of Bankers, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science and the Australasian Chambers of Commerce. In his Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law (1881), De Lissa argued for more comprehensive legislation for the protection of property and control of credit operations. He advocated a legal limit of liability to prevent a trader from incurring debts of more than four times his capital. He argued for reform in the administration of insolvent estates by placing them under a ‘bureau of insolvency’, rather than the law courts. Mitchell also considered De Lissa’s views on the labour problem, aired in the Australian Economist in 1891 in which he advocated a government bureau of industry to issue licences for restricting competition and limiting capital and employment in private industries.90 In 1894, De Lissa drew up procedures for joint- stock companies, and issued guidance on mining law. The close of the century called for a new order of public administration. Poet and journalist John Farrell felt strongly about the plight of the poor. Reputedly Argentine-born of Irish parents (whose search for a livelihood took them from Dublin to South America before they were drawn to the Victorian goldfields in 1852), Farrell was among the many working men roving the colonies seeking a living. He experienced the changes to the nature of work that increasingly looked askance at unskilled labour. After gold digging at Darwin and timber cutting and droving in Queensland, Farrell turned to brewing and managed Gulson’s breweries at Albury. With restless literary faculties, Farrell wrote satirical verses among his brewing recipes. His verses appeared in the local press at Albury; they were reissued as Ephemera, an Iliad of Albury (1878). His real literary debut was made in 1882 when

89 Farrell, King, Plummer along with B. R. Wise were among contributors to the Association’s monthly journal, Australian Economist (1888-18981), in which current issues like land taxation and state borrowing were debated. 90 Alfred De Lissa, The Labour Problem (Sydney: W. E. Smith, 1891)(DSM/042/P140).idem, Companies’ Work and Mining Law in New South Wales and Victoria: A Treatise for the Guidance of Solicitors, Directors, Investors and Others (London: George Robertson, 1894)(DSM/ 347.7/ D); idem, Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law: Proposal of a New System and of Theories for more comprehensive Legislation for the Protection of Property and Control of Credit Operations: with Remarks on Mr. Chamberlain's Bill (Sydney: George Robertson, 1881)(DSM/ 042/ P).

212 Jenny, a long verse narrative, appeared and ran for nearly a year in the Bulletin. He became a regular contributor of verse to that journal and is credited with the Bulletin’s first story about Australian life and people in 1884.91 Farrell’s poems were published in Sydney in 1887. He was briefly editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1890. On resigning, he continued to write its leaders, to review books, and to run a column (under the pen-name of ‘Niemand’). Largely forgotten today, Farrell was widely admired by his contemporaries.92 Farrell fought against social injustice. Bertram Stevens thought Farrell had a keen sense of social responsibility.93 Arthur Jose thought Farrell was too modest in undervaluing his own work: he carried ‘a high ideal of what poetry should offer’.94 Jose wrote that Farrell’s ‘friends knew him not only as a pioneer but as the lasting background of a brilliant panorama, the wise and steady and sympathetic observer by whose standards more recent achievement could be adequately tested.’95 Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864-1941) counted Farrell as his closest literary friend from whom he sought advice for his own writing.96 Mitchell (who had a high opinion of Paterson) lent Farrell his books.97 Farrell and Cotton (and Paterson) fell under the spell of American economist and reformer Henry George (1839-1897). George’s book Progress and Poverty (1879), one of the greatest best-sellers of the day, made him an international figure.98

91 ‘One Christmas Day’, December 27, 1884. John Farrell papers ML MSS 1522/1; John Farrell edited and introduced by Dirk H.R. Spennemann & Jane Downing, eds., An Iliad of Albury & other poems (1878-1883)(Albury, NSW: Letao Publishing, 2002); Jane Downing & Dirk H.R. Spennemann, eds., ReCollecting Albury writing: poetry and prose from Albury and district, 1859 to 2000 (Albury, N.S.W.: Letao, 2000); George Mackaness, ‘Gordon, Kendall and Farrell: Some Literary Curiosities’, Southerly 11, No.1 (1950): 48. 92 Sheila E. Tearle and B. T. Dowd, ‘John Farrell: Poet, Patriot, and Journalist, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 57, no.2 (June 1971):143; For personal tributes to Farrell: John Farrell, How he died, and other poems (London: Angus and Robertson, 1913), ix-lxvi.; John Farrell, My sundowner, and other poems edited with memoir and notes by Bertram Stevens (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1904). 93 ‘Memoir concerning John Farrell’ by Bertram Stevens in How He Died and Other Poems (1905 edition), M.L. A821. 94 Jose, Nineties, 46. 95 Ibid., 47. 96 Clement Semmler, The Banjo of the Bush, The Life and Times of A. B. Paterson (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1974), 64, 157. Semmler attributes Farrell to sharpening Paterson’s interest in journalism. 97 John Farrell, to Mitchell June 17, 1892, ML MSSA1461, 50; Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 38. 98 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth and the Remedy (London: William Reeves, 1879) (DSM/333/G). This sold more than 3 million copies by the time of its 50th anniversary in 1929, outselling all other works on economics. For its influence, see John Laurent, ed., Henry George’s Legacy in Economic Thought (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Pub., 2005), 3, 8. Cotton later wrote

213 Farrell and Cotton promoted reform proposals which were developed by George whose views were widely debated in the Economic Association. Cotton formed the Single Tax League of New South Wales and edited the Democrat, a single tax newspaper. Both were behind George’s visit to Australia in 1890; Vance Palmer described Farrell as George’s ‘foremost evangel’.99 Henry George was one of a number of non-Marxist social philosophers and reformers in the late nineteenth century United States, who disputed the view expressed by Carnegie and other disciples of sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) that great inequality in wealth and living conditions was inevitable, natural and necessary for the progress of civilization. Humane and deeply religious, George found it unacceptable that social inequalities should exist. George criticized inequality in modern society and disputed that ‘large classes should want the necessities of human life, and the vast majority should only get a poor and pinched living by the hardest toil.’100 An active Democrat, George’s fundamental idea was that society’s basic mistake lay in treating land as private property. He exposed the predatory nature of rent (Our Land and Land Policy, 1871). He showed how wealth was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. He stressed the need for a tax on land values only. His book Social Problems (1883), arguing that economic growth brings with it poverty for the many and wealth for the fortunate few, found a ready audience. According to George, private ownership of land allows those who possess land to charge rent from those who need access to land in order to produce income for themselves and society as a whole. Therefore that rent belongs to the society whose labours generated it; its collection by private individuals impoverishes those who produce it. Government should commandeer the full value of unimproved land to meet community needs and abolish all other taxes, which burden both workers and investors of capital. His doctrine of land nationalization found little sympathy in Australia.101 Mitchell’s reading of George fitted within his reading of writers on social and

historical fiction on wealth and inheritance, frugality and thrift, in terms of Sir Henry Parkes: ‘The Tragedy of Tyson’s Millions’, Lilley’s Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1, (June 1,1911), 20-21. 99 Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1954), 76. 100 Bremner, Giving, 147. 101 Laurent, Henry George’s Legacy, 8ff, 22 on the enthusiastic response to George at the time. On George see S.S. Gilchrist, Papers presented in commemoration of the centenary of publication of "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George at the Department of Economics, University of Sydney 27th June (Redfern, N.S.W.: Australian School of Social Science, 1979).

214 political economy at the time. Judging from what he read from reformist circles, he was sensitive to questions about inequality and injustice. He must have felt his own privilege as a sizeable landholder.

6.3 Philanthropy and culture: Erecting monuments Colonial society set great store on the erection of buildings. Substantial edifices, like Sydney’s General Post Office (1866-1891), represented the colony’s material progress. In 1884 visiting British manufacturer (later Sir) Richard Tangye (1833-1906) found that Sydney’s public buildings were very fine. A Birmingham industrialist, Tangye supported the development of that city’s library (founded in 1861, when Birmingham’s population was nearly 300,000).102 Tangye singled out Sydney’s post office as infinitely superior to the new post office in Birmingham. ‘But then the citizens of Sydney built their own’, he noted.103 Tangye would have also observed the disparity that was noticed at the same time in Sydney by visiting English historian James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) (whom Mitchell met), between the solid houses of the wealthy and moderately wealthy and the makeshift accommodation housing working people. Froude described whole villages around the city ‘made of mere boards and corrugated iron, slatternly sheds rather than human habitations…’.104 Selections among Mitchell’s reading suggest that he was concerned that the community be endowed with more than built structures. Buildings may mark progress, however opinion considered that intellectual components within these edifices were in short supply (as Daniel Deniehy pointed out many years earlier).105 Mitchell looked beyond the existence of physical structures; the built forms were merely a shell, and precarious at that, as the fire in September 1882, which had

102 Thomas Kelly, A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain (London: The Library Association, 1973), 47-9, 469. Birmingham’s local Shakespeare Club presented 1100 volumes to the library in 1864 to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth; these volumes became the nucleus of the Shakespeare Memorial Library. Joseph D. Hendry, A Social History of Branch Library Development (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association, 1974), 6-7. Fire damaged Birmingham’s library; it was rebuilt in 1882, 103 Richard Tangye, Reminiscences of travel in Australia, America, and Egypt 2nd ed. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1884), 82. 104 J. A. Froude, Oceana, Travellers’ Tales of Early Australia & New Zealand, the tempestuous voyage of J. A. Froude, 1884 & 1885 edited by Geoffrey Blainey(North Ryde, N.S.W.: Methuen Haynes, 1985), 95. Mitchell held several copies of Froude’s Oceana, or, England and her colonies (1886). 105 Martin, Deniehy, 18.

215 engulfed the Garden Palace housing the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, had shown.106 Discussion along these lines was shared with colleagues. Long-time family friend, the Registrar-General for New South Wales, Christopher Rolleston (1817-1888) agreed that colonial statistics showed a development which few countries could equal. Yet he questioned whether ‘we can boast of a corresponding advancement in all those qualities which go to form a high national character’.107 He had his doubts. He hoped that, with increasing wealth, measures would not be forgotten ‘which are necessary to promote the true happiness of the people, and to develop in the rising generation a love for all that is good and pure and lovable in our human nature, as well as conducive to their happiness hereafter.’ Mitchell’s friend ‘Banjo’ Paterson agreed. To him, Australian command of world markets for raw material was not enough. ‘Is it a fitting destiny for such a nation as ours’, he asked, ‘that we should have not higher objects than to grow wool and reap corn?’108 Paterson’s voice was among those like Mitchell who believed that ‘higher art’ needed to be encouraged. Mitchell was familiar with similar sentiment from reading the English art critic and Christian socialist reformer John Ruskin, who argued there was more to life than a mere capacity to produce wealth. Mankind was distinguished by ‘the ideals that inspire and guide him’. Communities are more than simple commercial aggregates. ‘A nation…is an organism which is inspired with a definite and peculiar life…(unified by) a common body of traditions from the past, in a common work in the present, and in a common hope and purpose for the future.’109 Ideas are the true life-blood of society. The true end of life is the formation of character. By way of ‘…intellectual life we are led to the deepest truths and richest treasures of existence.’110 Reissuing Daniel Deniehy’s speeches in 1884, lawyer Edward Martin highlighted Deniehy’s lament in the early 1860s that deficient scholarship never lacked excuses in New South Wales because it lacked institutions that nurtured

106 Chanin, Book Life, 182-3. 107 Christopher Rolleston, Notes on the Progress of New South Wales During the Ten Years 1872- 1881 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1883), 11 (DSM/042/P85). 108 A. B. Paterson, Australia for the Australians. A political pamphlet showing the necessity for Land Reform combined with protection (Sydney: Gordon & Gotch, 1889) (DSM/042/P33). 109 John Ruskin, Igdrasil: Journal of the Russian Reading Guild, A Magazine of Literature Art and Social Philosophy (London: George Allen, 1890-1892) Vol. 111, No. 15, (December 1891), 207. 110 Ruskin, Igdrasil, 210.

216 scholarship. Deniehy stressed that education is a cardinal and primary duty of any government: ‘The State is bound to assist institutions which aim at cultivation in maturer forms and for the benefit of adults, equally with those which have in view the elementary teaching of infancy and youth.’111 Deniehy pointed to Sydney’s lack of a public library. Nor did a public art gallery exist at that time. Consequently, the people of New South Wales did not know the higher manifestations of artistic power which ‘can be only known through the medium of imagination, like the fair scenes in foreign lands.’112 The question of institutions supporting cultural needs had long been on the horizon of Mitchell’s thoughts. Meetings of the voluntary Entomological Society in which his uncle and cousins were prominent were held at the Australian Museum. This museum was no longer linked, as it had been once, to the Australian Subscription Library that his father had long supported (and which the government assumed after James Mitchell’s death in 1869). With the Subscription Library absorbed by the Public Library, Government announced intentions to build a new (and badly needed) building to house and grow the Public Library. Yet Government reluctance to underwrite cultural institutions meant that instead it proposed in 1874 to combine the Public Library and the Australian Museum together. It was intended to house both (as well as a sculpture gallery and public lecture theatre) in a single building on the site of the Australian Museum. Government inertia meant that Sydney lacked an adequate library; it also lacked an art gallery. In his youth Mitchell followed exhibitions of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia. These were supported by colonists (his parents and family friend John Rae among them), who believed that the Society’s exhibitions (held between 1847-1857) were proper to the city that was developing under their watch.113 Daniel Deniehy agreed, writing that libraries and galleries of art were ‘national facilities’ that should be state supported ‘as educational institutions –

111 Headon & Perkins, Republicans, 152. 112 Martin, Deniehy, 18. 113 Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia, Exhibition of the Society for the promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia (Sydney: Printed by Kemp and Fairfax, 1847-1857). While a copy in Mitchell Library dating from 1849 bears Mitchell’s signature and bookplate it had escaped cataloguing within his collection as of August 2010. Background to the Society is given by: Robert Holden, ‘Fine Art Exhibitions and Collectors in Colonial Sydney, 1847-1877 in Patrician R. McDonald and Barry Pearce, The Artist and the Patron, Aspects of Colonial Art in New South Wales (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1988), 161-167.

217 as necessary instruments in the higher and maturer stages of national cultivation.’114 Mitchell followed moves to erect a gallery for Sydney. A long (and dramatic) genesis led to achieving a permanent public art gallery for the colony. The Gallery’s collection began in 1871 – but without premises when calls to establish a city art gallery were revived with the first conversazione of the New South Wales Academy of Art.115 Mitchell held copies from this time of the annual reports from the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria (with some copies inscribed by Redmond Barry). In Sydney, the Gallery’s collection narrowly missed destruction in the fire of 1882 that destroyed the Garden Palace by virtue of being housed in a separate annexe in the nearby grounds. A modest building to house the collection opened on the eastern edge of the Domain in 1885. This was criticised for being inadequate. The Sydney Morning Herald lamented that a city ‘so important as Sydney’ was without anything more than ‘a makeshift structure in which to display its Art treasures.’116 However, brick, mortar and cement were all that funds would allow for the plain brick building of six window-less rooms. Grand plans that existed were shelved for the future (like the proposal a decade earlier to house the gallery in the one building that would also contain the Australian Museum and the Public Library).117 Efforts to establish a permanent gallery ultimately led to the first completed portion of the new National Art Gallery of New South Wales being inaugurated in 1897. This opened with a loan exhibition of art that marked the Queen’s Jubilee and that Mitchell supported.118 Works lent by Mitchell were among the 570 exhibits seen by 2000 visitors daily.119 Public enthusiasm served as reminder of John Ruskin’s views about the moral function of the arts as a ‘visible sign of national virtue’.120

114 Headon & Perkins, Republicans, 150. 115 New South Wales Academy of Art, Constitution and laws of the New South Wales Academy of Art founded on the 24th of April, 1871 (Sydney: The Academy, 1871). 116 ‘The New Art Gallery’, SMH, July 22, 1884, 7. 117 Cartographic material drawn up by J. Horbury Hunt delineates sites proposed for the art gallery from 1889. Hunt’s plans for a Gothic building with a blind arcade of pointed arches was never built. Art Gallery of New South Wales, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aboutus/history/building (accessed 27 July 2010). 118 Loan exhibition to inaugurate the first completed portion of the gallery, on Her Majesty's birthday, 24th May 1897 (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer) (DSM/042/P84). 119 SMH, July 14, 1897, 4. Paintings that Mitchell lent by Sir Oswald Brierly, Paul Naftel and Conrad Martens drew attention. Brierly’s The “Black Prince” in a gale (valued at £210) and Spanish galleon on the Irish Coast (Armada) (valued at £150) were especially admired. 120 Ruskin, Igdrasil, 3:207-210.

218 A prominent exhibitor alongside Mitchell was Eadith Walker (1861-1937) (daughter and only child of banker Thomas Walker, once a business associate of James Mitchell and to whom the Mitchells were indebted). On his death in 1886 she inherited, at the age of 25, an estate worth over £900,000. Like Burdett-Coutts, she upheld the view that wealth was to be used responsibly. Godmother to Andrew Paterson’s child, she responded to his call and gave a substantial sum to the Trustees of the Art Gallery for the purpose of showing an exhibition of Australian Art in London. This was intended to promote Australian art abroad and enable artists to submit their art to the judgement of connoisseurs outside Australia.121 Nearly 400 works travelled to London, where the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair presented the exhibition of contemporary Australian art between April and July of 1898. The Australian colonies were far from the ‘land of promise’ for the working man that the high-keyed paintings by Australian Impressionists might have suggested. In pick and pannikin days, an ordinary single man could work for himself, but mechanized industry changed this. Steeped in cooperative rhetoric, the utopian journalist William Lane (1861-1917), whom Rose Scott supported, observed that the economy of big business predominated over small enterprise in all branches of industry. Where once a man could be his own master, growing sophistication in industrial production meant that the cost of owning machinery to work with was beyond the individual.122 With more capital required for a man to set up for himself, it was difficult for a man to be his own master (as John Farrell experienced). With the face of industry and business changing globally, the self-educated man-on-the-move, like heartily-built John Farrell, was a thing of the past. Colonial moral fibre was held to be under threat. ‘The spirit of avarice as shown in the desire for money for the sake of money alone, seems to be on the increase, and with it comes the absence of that moral fibre which used to be exhibited in the doing of work for the sake of doing it well as much as for what it would bring.’123 Editorials in the Sydney Morning Herald argued that the future depended on the spread of intelligence to outstrip that of discontent. Likewise the new class of commercially successful entrepreneurs and their

121 ‘Australian art at the Grafton’, The Artist, Vol. 22, No. 222, (June 1898), 105-108. 122 John Miller, The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (Sydney: Edwards, Dunlop & Co., 1892), 109 (DSM/A823/L266/1A1). 123 Editorial, SMH, October 29, 1887, 11.

219 descendants (like Sir Richard Tangye and Eadith Walker) were evolving a New Philanthropy. Mercantile elites (a ‘new gentry’) would ensure metropolitan institutions became established that the state would not institute with shrinking budgets let alone the whims of government legislators.124 Tangye and Walker were patrons chiefly enriched by commerce and trade. The writer and art historian Elizabeth Rigby, later Lady Eastlake (1809-1893), wife of Sir Charles Eastlake, director of London’s National Gallery (and who gave advice to Victoria about establishing a collection of paintings for Melbourne), recorded how patronage in Britain between 1830 and 1840 was assumed by such patrons.125 This gathered pace through the nineteenth century (including in Australia). Bradford mill owner, Abraham Mitchell (1825-1896), whose fortune came from supplying mohair for the luxury trade, typified the face of private patronage in the later Victorian era. He was painted by British realist artist La Thangue in 1887 at his Bowling Park home, where he had a private gallery known as the Mitchell Gallery.126 In Sydney, Bolton-born auctioneer turned pastoral financier and refrigeration entrepreneur Thomas Mort (1816-1878) likewise established his own gallery in his Darling Point home.127 As La Thangue’s painting and photographs of Mort’s gallery shows, money became the making of cultural identity.128 An 1885 book on public and private libraries of Glasgow confirmed this. Printed for private circulation and subscribers, Sydney’s Free Public Library had a copy. It includes a chapter on Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. Glasgow tobacco manufacturer, Stephen Mitchell (1789-1874), a widely-read bachelor, gave almost £70,000 to build and stock a public library for the people of Glasgow.129 From its opening in 1877, this library played a central role in the city’s community. Money and culture were not only for private consumption.

124 Following her father’s example, Eadith Walker largely directed her wealth towards hospitals. Patricia Skehan, Eadith: Concord’s royal kin (Concord, NSW: P. Skehan, 2003). 125 Eastlake gave advice to Sir Redmond Barry in 1862 and later selected in London the first modern paintings for Melbourne’s fledgling art Gallery on a £1000 grant from the Victorian Government’s Commission on Fine Art (1864-5): Vaughan, ‘Before Felton’, 3, 10. 126 Kenneth McConkey, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 43-48. 127 Interiors and exteriors, Greenoakes, ca. 1861-1910 in Mort family pictorial material, ca. 1857- 1910, ML PXD 993 no.73. 128 Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 368. 129 No relation appears to exist between Mitchell and Stephen Mitchell, nor London collector William Mitchell (1820-1908) whose wealth from Australian investments enabled from mid-century his collecting early German woodcuts, now in the British Museum. See Coppel, ‘William Mitchell’, 169.

220 The London-based sugar magnate and sugar-cube inventor Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899) was another private art collector whose home housed a private gallery. It displayed nearly a hundred pictures including Millais’ famous The Northwest Passage (1878).130 Showing how the private collector could lever the establishment of cultural institutions, Tate offered his collection to the State and to build a gallery for it at a cost of £80,000 if the Government would grant him a site. Several years of frenzied press debate followed Tate’s offer of 57 paintings to the National Gallery in October 1889 with arguments over where they would be housed. The parsimonious response from government that Tate received generated wide public debate over the role of Government in cultural patronage.131 Eventually he was given the former prison site at Millbank, where the new gallery was built by Tate’s private initiative on Government- owned land. The Prince of Wales opened Tate’s building and the National Gallery of British Art in July 1897. In all likelihood, Mitchell knew about this; Tate’s gift was publicised in the Australian press.132 Tate also built the Brixton Free Library in 1893 and ‘Tate’s cube sugar’ was known world-wide.133 Institutions of ‘high culture’ were to come under greatest scrutiny in the realm of literature. The changing nature of information, and its popularization, brought to the forefront debate over literature that was suitable for public consumption. By the 1880s the business of bookselling picked up pace, showing a large consumption for print. The Australasian Federal Directory, a national business directory for the colonies, listed 800 booksellers and stationers for a population of 3.4 million across the colonies, including New Zealand.134 It included the names of 178 booksellers and stationers in New South Wales alone. By the reckoning of the Colonial Book Circular, a territory as extensive as the European Continent, with a million less inhabitants than London, saw an average annual expenditure on books and stationary of more than 11 shillings per head of population – or 45 shillings from every household. This did not take account of local publications or newspapers. It claimed

130 Times, December 6, 1899, 8. 131 Indeed Tate withdrew his offer in March 1892, before negotiations over housing the collection resumed. Discussion of this debate is given by Amy Woodson-Boulton, ‘The Art of compromise, The founding of the National Gallery of British Art, 1890-1892’, Museum and Society 1 (3), 147-169. 132 ‘A new art gallery, Mr Henry Tate’s Gift’, The Argus, July 23, 1897, 5. 133 Art Gallery of New South Wales, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aboutus/history/building. 134 The Australasian Federal Directory of Commerce, Trades and Professions, National Business Directory for the Australasian Colonies Classified Directory (Melbourne: J. W. F. Rogers, 1887), Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 1887), 2.

221 there were nearly 700 newspapers sold for every 5000 persons.135 Publishers built on this interest by producing Australian material. A rash of publications on Australia and its history – emphasizing advance and progress – appeared with the 1888 centenary. Among them were W. Frederic Morrison’s The Aldine Centennial History of New South Wales, and Ernest Favenc’s history of exploration. Inter-colonial rivalry produced more localised views like Alexander Sutherland’s Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present. No colony wanted to be outdone by another. Likewise with business organizations. Philip Joseph (‘P.J.’) Holdsworth wrote the Handbook of Howard Smith & Sons, incorporating a popular history of Australia into an account of the line of inter-colonial steamships. There was even A metrical history of New South Wales, offering the history of the past century in a hundred lines.136 Whereas collectors in Sydney like Thomas Mort and the trustees of the colony’s new public gallery hunted after European trophies for their collections, Mitchell’s quarry was Australian history.137 Mitchell knew that special interest was attached to early colonial history and its sources.138 He knew many of those who shared his interest in the early history of Australia’s European settlement. The difficulty was getting hold of material. An early president of the Victorian Booksellers’ Association, Melbourne bookseller William Thomas Pyke (1859-1933), pointed to colonial publications before the 1850s being very expensive or out of print and not easily procurable at the bookshops.139 Worse, primary sources were widely scattered with many in private hands.140 Philip Gidley King (1817-1904), eldest son of the early marine surveyor Philip Parker

135 Edward Augustus Petherick, Ed., The Torch and Colonial Book Circular: including classified lists of new publications –English, American and colonial –in all departments of literature, science and art (London: Petherick, 1887), 2 (DSM/Q015/T). 136 W. Frederic Morrison, The Aldine centennial history of New South Wales, illustrated embracing sketches of noted people, the rise and progress of her varied enterprises, and illustrations together with maps of latest survey. (Sydney: Aldine Publishing Company, 1888) (DSM/Z/Q991/M); Ernest Favenc, The history of Australian exploration from 1788 to 1888, compiled from state documents and the most authentic sources of information, issued under the auspices of the governments (Sydney: Turner & Henderson, 1888); Alexander Sutherland, Victoria and its metropolis: past and present, (Melbourne: McCarron, Bird, 1888) (DSM/Q992/S). 137 Mort bought Elizabethan armour and English coats of mail to furnish his gallery of pictures. European salon paintings were also sought by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. 138 ‘The First Melbourne Directory’, Argus, September 28, 1882, 9. 139 The Victorian Booksellers’ and Stationers’ Association came about in 1878, with Samuel Mullens presiding. Argus, February 5, 1878,4; Argus, January 25, 1879, 5. 140 ‘Historical Records of New South Wales’, WA, March 9, 1899, 3.

222 King (1791-1856) and grandson of his namesake, the seventh colonial Governor Philip Gidley King (1758-1808), held many of their papers. As a freetrader who supported Parkes, King was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1880. Living at his Sydney house in Double Bay, not far from Mitchell, King corresponded with George Rusden when Rusden was writing his histories of Australia and New Zealand.141 Later, when George Barton was preparing the History of New South Wales (1889), he worked from King’s papers. King also helped journalist Francis Myers (1854-1907), whom William Dalley (when Acting Colonial Secretary) asked to edit the Brabourne Papers.142 Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, the first Lord Brabourne (1829-1893), English politician and author of tales about fairies, elves, dwarfs and witches, inherited papers from a distant relation, Sir Joseph Banks. He offered these to the British Library. While the library dithered over their purchase, Lord Brabourne presided over a reception at London’s Empire Club in April 1884 attended by Sir Henry Parkes. During discussion of future Imperial relations, Parkes agreed to buy Brabourne’s papers. That July the Sydney Morning Herald published the news that £150 was paid for them.143 The approaching Centenary stimulated desires to capture Australia’s early history (which became conflated with Sydney’s early history). Up to then, in the rush to the greatness that politicians regularly predicted for Australia, little official thought had been given to the dusty past. This was hardly surprising when, as Lord Brabourne observed, only twenty-six of the forty counties of England had tolerably complete printed histories. Some of these had become so scarce that they fetched from £20 to

141 P. G. King, Memoranda about early history of New South Wales, 1878, George William Rusden Papers, Vol. 20, GWR021, Trinity College, University of Melbourne. Another whom he corresponded with was Alexander Oliver (1832-1904) fellow university student with Mitchell and Windeyer, a lawyer and prominent public servant. Letter from Philip Gidley King to Mr Oliver regarding publication of James Cook's log and charts in Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Part 1, 10 April 1893 with notes in response by Frank Bladen, 18 April 1893, ML DLMSQ664. 142 ‘Colonial Topics’, Argus, April 16, 1884, 9; SMH, January 29, 1886, 4; Brisbane Courier, June 1, 1886, 5; The Brabourne Papers, Summary of the contents (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1886). 143 ‘News of the Day’, SMH, July 30, 1884, 9; ‘Old Australian Records’, Argus, August 18, 1884, 6; ‘The Brabourne Collection’ SMH, August 19, 1884, 5; The Brabourne papers (relating to the settlement and early history of the colony; purchased from Lord Brabourne by Sir Saul Samuel, Agent- General): a pamphlet containing a summary of the contents of these important papers, 2nd edition (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1897). The purchase was seen as commendable.

223 £50 a volume if they appeared for sale.144 In Sydney, the government intended to mark the Centenary by updating the colony’s official history (from 1881).145 However, official papers from Australia’s (hence Sydney’s) early days were fragmentary. Few early records could be found. No records for the years 1788-1800 could be traced locally. Further impetus (and example) to capture Australia’s early history came from the English Calendar of State Papers, compilations issued from 1856 which the Argus said were ‘teeming with treasures which are much too little known’.146 First in this series were sources preserved in the State Paper Department of Britain’s Public Records Office, dating from the reigns of the Tudor monarchs and of James l. These were published in twelve volumes between 1856 and 1872. A Colonial Series (of sources dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) followed from 1860. These were issued alongside Britain’s Rolls series issued from 1858.147 They were part of a publication series that English judge John Romilly (1802-1874), Master of the Rolls (1851-1873), proposed to the Treasury in 1857. Issuing records from Britain’s early history this way, selected by editors and without abridgement, gave readers possession of authentic information from which history could be written. These publications were also a step toward archival awareness. This was important because generally little systematic preservation of historical records existed up to then. Ideas for publishing Australia’s records in this manner were put to the Colonial Treasurer by the trustees of Sydney’s Public Library.148 The purchase of the Brabourne papers triggered the compiling of the Historical Records of New South Wales (1892-1901). In April 1887, Charles Potter, the Government Printer, engaged the English- born former Australian schools inspector and teacher James Bonwick (1817-1906) to

144 Equivalent today to between £1000 to £2,500, ‘The November Magazines’, Argus, 21 December, 1889, 4. 145 Thomas Richards, New South Wales in 1881: a brief statistical and descriptive account of the colony up to the end of the year extracted chiefly from official records (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881). 146 Argus, November 11, 1868, 6; ‘About New Books’, BC, May 1, 1876, 3; Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers. Domestic Series: of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I. 1547-1625 preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts &c., 1856-1872). 147 Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi scriptores or Chronicles and memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages (1858-1996) (London: published by the authority of H. M. Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, 1858-1996). 148 SMH, Saturday May 14, 1892, 13.

224 transcribe for £50 copies of colonial records in the Public Records in London. An ‘Historical Commission’ was appointed in Sydney to draw up the new publication. Working with Potter on this were Robert Walker (chief librarian of Sydney’s Public Library), Mitchell’s friend George Barton, and Sydney Morning Herald sub-editor Alexander Britton. When Bonwick’s first batch of transcriptions reached Sydney in late 1887, the importance of the material was recognized and Bonwick was kept on. Bonwick’s material appeared in the first volume of the History of New South Wales from the Records (1889) (covering the period 1783–1789), which Barton wrote. Britten wrote a second volume (covering 1789–1794), but died before its publication in 1894. By then it was decided that the transcripts themselves should be published. Frank Bladen took charge and seven volumes of the Historical Records of New South Wales (1892-1902) followed under his editorship. Bladen would be transferred in 1896 to the Public Library, where he worked on the Records until 1899 when given charge of the library's lending branch. The Records project ended in 1901 from insufficient funds. The first volume was advertised as ‘what is likely to prove the most important historical work on Australia that has yet appeared’149. It was promoted as a comprehensive history of Australia’s early years based upon authentic records. Advertisements claimed that this was an innovation, being something ‘no previous writers of the history of the colony had done’. Bonwick undoubtedly had a hand in encouraging the series which would not have been possible without his work. A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society (1865) and the Anthropological Institute (1869), Bonwick had from 1872 been writing to Henry Parkes to whom he turned for support in the hope of becoming the archivist for New South Wales.150 At the time, the Canadian government began searching English archives for Canada’s early historic records. Canadian Douglas Brymner (1823–1902), appointed Dominion Archivist in 1872, began transcribing documents in London’s Public Records Office

149 Advertisement, SMH, January 4, 1890, 8. 150 Alan Ventress, ‘A tale of tension and neglects: state archives in New South Wales 1788-1960’, The Australian Library Journal, November 2007, 430-431. Ventress attributes George Barton with first proposing the idea of a records office for government archives. Mitchell Library, SLNSW, Parkes Correspondence, vol. 6, A876, 39.

225 where Bonwick met him.151 Bonwick thought Australia should follow Canada’s example. In all probability they were all aware too (as Mitchell was) of Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) and his ‘history factory’ in San Francisco, where miner turned publisher Bancroft supervised twenty men to assemble the thirty-nine volume History of the Pacific States. Copies of Bancroft’s volumes were to be found in Sydney’s Public Library. Bancroft compiled an extensive collection of early books and documents pertaining to the history of the western United States; ultimately he sold his collection of 20,000 volumes to the University of California at Berkeley, where it formed the cornerstone of the Bancroft Library’s collection of Western Americana.152 The son of a Surrey carpenter, James Bonwick, while a schoolteacher in Victoria, had written many texts for colonial schoolchildren. In keeping with the Victorian Era’s fetish for information, Bonwick generally, collected facts, as was sought for at the time however his special value came from his tracing and transcribing facts from primary sources. Returning to England in order to recover from failing health, Bonwick’s interest in Australian source material expanded into the transcription of this material for the colonies. He did so first for the Queensland Government for a year (from June 1883); then South Australia (1885); the Melbourne Public Library (1886); Tasmania (1887, and ongoing to 1893); then finally for New South Wales (1887-1902). His work for New South Wales was the basis for the two volume History of New South Wales from the Records (1889-94), with many of his transcripts printed in the eight volumes of the Historical Records of New South Wales (1892-1901). In Britain, the late sixteenth century antiquarian William Camden is considered the founding father of English Local History. The inscription on Camden’s tomb in Westminster Abbey describes him as the Nurse of Antiquity and ‘the lantern

151 James Bonwick, The Writing of Colonial History: extracts from the ‘Home News’, 29 March, 1895 and the ‘British Australasian’, 4th April, 1895 (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1895), 6–7.; Guy Featherstone, ‘James Bonwick’, The LaTrobe Journal 3, no.11 (1973), 62. 152 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft,1882-1890). Peter Booth Wiley, A Free Library in This City, The Illustrated History of the San Francisco Public Library (San Francisco; Sydney: Weldon Owen, 1996), 95. Harry Clark, The Production, publication and sale of the works of Hubert Hower Bancroft, Pd.D. diss. University of California, 1969. John S. Hittell, The commerce and industries of the Pacific coast of North America (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882), (DSM/Q609/H). Various writers, Homes of American Authors, comprising anecdotal, personal, and descriptive sketches (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1855) (DSM/928.1/H).

226 unto succeeding ages’.153 As Camden was important in the development of British historiography, Bonwick was important for Australian historiography because he showed the wealth to be found in original sources. Although Bonwick’s reliance on factual evidence was impeded by official censorship and by his own bias and insufficient editorial oversight, Bonwick became a household name in Australia because he brought events directly to the reader, unlike earlier histories that had been written by those who took part in the events they described and whose personal views coloured their accounts.154 Later criticism that Bonwick lacked analysis overlooks the judgement and dedication with which he uncovered the records.155 His achievements were remarkable given the obstacles he faced. Working full–time, in often uncomfortable locations, he patiently hand-copied approximately 125,000 foolscap sheets for the Tasmanian and New South Wales governments while serving them concurrently. He worked with failing eyesight and insufficient funds. He feared being suspended, working by the grace of Henry Parkes.156 Sir Saul Samuel (1820-1900), the colony’s Agent-General in London (1880-1897), was unsupportive (‘having always objection to our “Official History”’, Bonwick wrote to Frank Bladen).157 British officials were often mistrusting. Frequently the Home Office rejected his work as beyond the scope of his Permit. His search required exhaustive examination of documents that were housed (often badly) in cold, dimly lit Ministerial and Departmental Offices scattered across London and beyond.158 Searching for letters dating up to 1840 at the Bishop of London’s Library in Fulham, Bonwick told Bladen that he emerged from the Bishop’s Monument Room ‘as black as a chimney sweep.’159 Yet he made remarkable discoveries that included a collection of Captain Cook’s letters to the Admiralty and

153 R. C. Richardson, ‘William Camden and the Re-discovery of England’, Transactions Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 78 (2004), 1. 154 ‘Publications Received, First Twenty Years of Australia’, HM, September 11, 1882, 2; James Bonwick, Early Struggles of the Australian Press (London: Gordon & Gotch, 1890). This presented source material in facsimile; it illustrates his endeavour to illuminate for Australians the history of early colonial times. 155 For Bonwick’s autobiography: James Bonwick, An Octogenarian's Reminiscences (London: Nichols, 1902). 156 ‘Obituary, Mr James Bonwick’, The Advertiser, February 9, 1906, 4. 157 Bonwick to Bladen, June 29, 1894, 22, ML MSS 1261/4. 158 These included the Public Record Office in London, the British Museum, the Home Office, The Colonial Office, the War Office, the Privy Council Office, the Admiralty, the Indian Office, the London Missionary Society, and Somerset House. 159 Bonwick to Bladen, June 29, 1894, Grace Hendy-Pooley Papers ML MSS1261/4, 22.

227 correspondence by Mathew Flinders.160 Aware that the material he was chasing was priceless, he prioritised items to copy and transcribed them whenever opportunity allowed.161 Then aged over seventy, and in general fear of having his work suspended, the degree of self-sacrifice he applied to the task is impressive. Calling on two female copyists to help him, he directed them to copy the manuscript of Commissioner Bigge’s evidences and letters from the early 1820s.162 Appreciating the importance of this particular work, Bonwick asked Charles Potter to use his influence with Government to continue paying them. Bonwick offered his own services as a supervisor without a salary.163 As in his earlier First Twenty Years of Australia (1882) and Port Phillip Settlement (1883), he showed how central documents were to gaining historical perspective. Additionally, he recovered material that might otherwise have disappeared, because (as he found in the early 1880s) valuable documents were at risk of being lost forever from neglect. Highlighting the importance of source material, Bonwick’s transcriptions established the foundations for serious historical study (although the proper collection and preservation of source material was not appreciated until much later).164 The whereabouts of many early manuscripts from Australia was a mystery. Alexander Britton considered that they had been destroyed, ‘but by whom or with what object can only be conjectured.’165 Charles Badham’s first university correspondence student, policeman Martin Brennan wrote in his reminiscences that Sir John Robertson, when Premier, ordered the destruction of ‘all the records of the Colony’s early settlement’. Brennan said that many tons of these were consigned to

160 WA, October 6, 1886, 3. 161 James Bonwick to Bladen, June 29, 1894. 162 John Thomas Bigge, 1780-1843 & Great Britain Parliament House of Commons, 1968, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales together with a report from the Select Committee on the Conduct of General Darling with minutes of evidence and appendix, [1822/35] (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968). For background on Bigge see John Ritchie, Punishment and profit: the reports of Commissioner John Bigge on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, 1822-1823; their origins, nature and significance (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970). 163 Bonwick to Bladen, June 28, 1895, 36, ML MSS1261/4; The Tasmanian government paid Bonwick a guinea per day between 1890 and 1894. Featherstone, ‘James Bonwick’, 67. 164 Featherstone, ‘Bonwick’, 68. Featherstone refers to J. M. Ward, ‘Historiography’, in A. L. McLeod, ed., The Pattern of Australian Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), 216; Featherstone also points out the corruption of Bonwick’s work through censorship, editing and rearrangement. 165 SMH, May 14, 1892, 13.

228 the flames.166 Historical records were frequently jettisoned as garbage, at best sold as scrap. The Tasmanian government photographer John Watt Beattie (1859-1930) ran a side- line retrieving government records and selling them. For him, this was not filching, but public duty. Aberdeen-born Beattie who arrived in Tasmania in 1878, was a local historical entrepreneur and Tasmaniana promoter. This interest developed when he assembled two groups of historical portraits of Tasmania’s parliamentarians and governors. For the parliamentarians he gathered 247 portraits, which he seried in rows into a single large picture (measuring 7 feet by 4 ½ feet). Like George Harris in England found when searching for past documentation, Beattie encountered difficulties at the outset when trying to locate material for this project. He became determined to ‘place on record something that would preserve’ for future generations a tangible memento of those who ‘live in the history of Tasmania’.167 Beattie took up Tasmanian history with zeal. He opened a museum presenting artifacts from Tasmania’s convict past. It became one of Hobart’s sights and showed that he looked where others would not. His photographs illustrated relics from convictism and Tasmania’s Aboriginals. Accustomed to cutting through the bush with a machete to reach a landscape he wanted to photograph, the customarily adroit Beattie found cutting through prejudice about Tasmania’s early history was more difficult. Beattie’s concern for Tasmania’s historic relics saw him develop an unequalled familiarity with a Tasmanian past that most others chose to bury. Appointed photographer to the Government of Tasmania in 1897, he also became a Fellow and co-founder of the historical and geographical section of the Royal Society of Tasmania (established in 1899).168 When the Tasmanian centenary was celebrated in February 1904, Beattie gave the key-note address in Hobart’s Town Hall on

166 Martin Brennan, Reminiscences of the gold fields, and elsewhere in New South Wales: covering a period of forty-eight years’service as an officer of the police (Sydney: William Brooks, 1907), 291; On the burning of earlier papers belonging to Premier Donaldson see Chapter 1. The problem also existed in New Zealand: Edward Tregear, ‘The Archives of New Zealand’, Monthly Review (1890), 622-625: 623. 167 ‘Two Historical Pictures’, HM, October 19, 1895, 4; John Watt Beattie, Members of the Parliaments of Tasmania, 1895 (DSM/FA923.2/B); John Watt Beattie, Governors of Tasmania, from 1804 to 1896 (Hobart: J. W. Beattie, 1895) (DSM/QA923.59/B). 168 The Gazette, HM, January 5, 1897, 2; ‘Lecture in the Town Hall, Lives and times of early Tasmanian governors’, HM, February 19, 1904, 6; John Watt Beattie (Compiled) Port Arthur and Tasman Peninsula illustrating the convict days of Tasmania (Hobart: Mercury Office, 1905); John Watt Beattie, Glimpses of the lives and times of the early Tasmanian governors: being lectures delivered in Hobart during the centenary celebrations in February, 1904 (Hobart: Davies Bros., 1905).

229 Tasmania’s early history.169 Beattie sold Tasmanian government records to George Robertson in Sydney. Having watched the colony’s records disappear into waste, be washed into pulp, or burned, Beattie thought it ‘high time for a man of some sense and conscience to do something towards ‘snatching those brands from the burning’; and I have been endeavouring to do this all along as opportunity offers’. He told Robertson that records of Tasmania’s history were treated without respect, being sold off

in wilful ignorance and disgusting selfishness, the sole object being to give a few political parasites and debtors work, and of raising a few pounds by the sale of the waste paper. That is a fact! They have sent tons of tons down to the New Zealand paper mills and tons they have wickedly burned. This last lot you bought from me was partly purchased and partly “rescued” from a New Zealand consignment and was about the last remaining batch (sad to relate) of a store of, well, I think, priceless treasure.170

Beattie had a scholar’s understanding for the importance of source material and the significance of Tasmania’s penal records. Official lack of interest in such things was notorious. Papers from the Chief Secretary’s Department in Hobart languished in a branch of the department with the administrator of charitable relief. In 1887, the Deputy Sheriff complained about their filthy condition. The papers were then put under the Sheriff’s care (and remained so until the Tasmanian State Archives were established in 1951). In 1889 when early records of the colony and the Port Arthur library were discovered in a loft in the Ordnance Stores, these were scattered around departments.171 No interest was shown in their preservation. Beattie knew he had a ready buyer in George Robertson, who bought from him frequently. Tasmania offered a rich source of government records and Beattie

169 HM, May 22, 1889, 2. For information on Beattie see Chris Long, Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940 (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 1995), 12-15. 170 Beattie to Robertson, January 10, 1899, ML A1461, 173. Books too were lost. Slater cites the rarity of an 1804 edition of Dr. Charles Vallancey’s Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (Dublin: Thomas Ewing, 1770-1804). From this edition, parts of volume six are very scarce with nearly all the copies having been accidentally sold for waste-paper. See J. Herbert Slater, The Romance of Book Collecting (London: Elliott Stock, 1898), 45. It was not only in Australia that records were destroyed. Christensen (1962) points out that all the papers linked with Christian Socialism, lodged by J.M. Ludlow in the Working Men’s College, were thrown out as waste paper. Christensen, Christian Socialism, Preface. 171 HM, May 22, 1889, 2.

230 harked back to earlier sales made to Robertson: ‘The big Port Arthur lot you got from me was obtained in the same way and if I hadn’t “rescued” it where would it have been now? Why, destroyed in the fire that swept away the old buildings last year and so with the present lot in question the same query holds good.’172 The fire that swept Port Arthur on the last day of 1897 destroyed the four-storey Penitentiary (standing since 1836). This satisfied those who believed that trace of the ‘system’ that flourished there fifty years before should be ‘wiped out’. Beattie chastised Robertson for questioning him about how the ‘rescued’ items that Robertson had bought from him came into circulation. ‘To my mind a collector who is wealthy enough to hold such papers should consider himself as doing work of incalculable value for the future in securing them and keeping them beyond the reach of the vandal – he is really a national benefactor.’173 Robertson’s correspondence with Beattie does not indicate whether Mitchell was his buyer, but Mitchell owned Beattie’s Port Arthur Past & Present (1891) and he assembled a large collection of Tasmanian papers dating from 1821 to 1877.174 In 1909 the Sydney Morning Herald made much of Mitchell leaving the priceless bequest of over a hundred volumes of manuscripts ‘concerned solely with Tasmania, Port Arthur, the old records and early administration’.175 Mitchell did not share the anxiety others had at times expressed about how source material might be viewed. As the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised in 1885, reproductions of a forgotten past ‘even if their accuracy were beyond challenge, could hardly have any other tendency than to promote ill feeling and disunion.’176

172 Beattie to Robertson, January 10, 1899, ML A1461, 173. 173 January 10, 1899, Beattie to Robertson; Basil Rait, Alberto Archibald, Pictorial Portrayal of Tasmania’s Past: From Beatties Studio, the Oldest of its Kind in Australia (Hobart: A. A. Stephenson, Beatties Studio, 1982), iv-v; Margaret Tassell, David Wood (Compiled), Tasmanian Photographer: From the John Watt Beattie Collection (Launceston, Tas.: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1981) 7-11; If Robertson was nervous over where Beattie’s material came from, perhaps fearing legal repercussions over what might be argued was theft, different colonial legal jurisdictions would have made it difficult to pursue the matter. 174 ‘Selected Tasmanian Papers, 1821-1877’, Mitchell Library, bequeathed by David Scott Mitchell, 87 volumes from a series of 368 volumes; ‘Tasmania Supreme Court, Death Warrants and related papers 1818-1884’, ML C202-3; J. Watt Beattie, Port Arthur Past & Present (Melbourne: Rae Bros., c.1891) (DSM/986.8/B); Judgement that Mitchell and Beattie showed about the convict records of Australia, unlike many of their contemporaries, was endorsed when these records were placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007. UNESCO, ‘The Convict Records of Australia’ in Memory of the World Register (Registered Heritage), http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php- URL_ID=22624&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed March 11, 2011). 175 ‘The Mitchell Library. A Priceless Bequest’, SMH, August 21, 1909, 5. 176 SMH, May 27, 1885, 9.

231 Owing to convictism, the paper summed up that in a mixed community, as existed in the colony, no-one with sense and consideration would resuscitate old tales or fables that could break up the peace of families, and spread ill-feeling, or at least wide embarrassment. The best course of action to take was ‘to destroy old records that might have been productive of mischief had they fallen into inconsiderate hands.’177 When Martin Brennan spoke of records being consigned to the flames in Sydney, Bathurst, and other centres, he pointed to the ‘chronicles of an unparalleled period of cruelty and tyranny’ vanishing into thin air ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’.178 Even Bonwick with his factual reliance, removed names from the first batch of transcripts he sent to Sydney.179 Mitchell had encountered a similar selectivity with Annie Parkes with whom he exchanged material. The daughter of Sir Henry Parkes, she was Parkes’ right hand and familiar with his correspondence and collection. Her request that Mitchell destroy letters between her brother Varney (1859-1935) and Parkes, wanting to conceal the quarrel between them, may have given Mitchell additional concern about the need to preserve documents for posterity.180 There was a need for this with more people beginning to take an interest in family history.181 To Mitchell, it was important to preserve records from selective destruction and editing. Like the somewhat contrarian Mitchell, who lacked prejudice about Sydney’s past that the Sydney Morning Herald expressed, editor of the Historical Records of New South Wales Frank Bladen and his assistant, journalist Grace Hendy-Pooley (1864-1947), both appreciated the need for an empirical approach to history. They understood that access to original documents was essential if history was to rest on a sound factual basis and they dug for source material. Bladen sought Mitchell out for source material that Bonwick missed and which Mitchell owned. In many instances Mitchell held the only copy in the Colony, as was the case with the printed account of

177 Beattie to Robertson, January 10, 1899, ML A1461, 173. 178 Brennan, Reminiscences of the Gold Fields, 291. Brennan was referring to records of early settlement that were burned in Sydney, Bathurst, and other centres in the Colony following orders from Sir John Robertson, when Premier. 179 Featherstone, ‘Bonwick’, 69. 180 Annie Parkes to Mitchell, March 13,1897, ML A1461/111. 181 The University’s Department of history was established in 1891. Fletcher, Australian History in New South Wales, xi. Fletcher notes the awareness of history within educated circles.

232 the trial of pioneering pastoralist John Macarthur in February 1808.182 Working for nine years on the Historic Records of Australia, Grace Hendy- Pooley developed a highly specialised knowledge of Australian history.183 Bladen said she gave him many opportunities for correcting judgements when he was editing the Historical Records. Later, when Bladen wrote a testimonial for her in 1902, he described her dedication to early colonial times as unequalled: ‘Amongst those who have devoted themselves to the investigation of Early Australian History particularly in regard to the old marks of bygone Sydney I know of no one [other than Hendy- Pooley] who has a larger fund of collected information or a greater facility in effectively utilising it’.184 The editor of the Illustrated Sydney News (for which Hendy-Pooley wrote) also testified to her value, saying that her short sketches showed ‘care and descriptive power above the average.’185 Mitchell gave her his time and access to his resources and they enjoyed sharing their mutual interest in history. Her letters to him suggest a familiarity developed from frequent discussion. They also show the difficulty facing local historians seeking details about Australia’s past when traces of them could be hard to find. To recover historical detail, she began indexing the Sydney Gazette, telling Mitchell that as long as she had the date of a fact she could more or less locate detail for it ‘unless it is something not likely to have been recorded.’186 Her letters show Mitchell working like a historian, reconstructing a fuller picture of the past than had survived.187 They chased historical details together and he helped her by giving her dates she sought. This was undoubtedly in the manner that Arthur Jose described the help that Mitchell gave him in writing a sketch of

182 March 24, 1898, ML MSSA1461/129; The Trial of John McArthur, Esq., before a court of criminal judicature, assembled at Sydney, in New South Wales, on February the 2nd, 1808, and four following days (London: Printed by Wood & Innes, 1808) (DSM/C912); Like Bonwick, Bladen brought to light many items never before made public and corrected misperceptions about the early history of New South Wales. ‘Historical Records of New South Wales’, WA, March 9, 3. 183 Hendy-Pooley’s alertness to detail may have been inherited from her paternal grandfather, John Mason Hendy-Pooley, the controller of the Household at Dublin Castle. Argus, April 13, 1918, 13. Pooley worked for nine years on the Historic Records of Australia. Later she worked for 16 years as officer of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library. ‘Parliamentary Library, Retirement of Miss Pooley’, The Canberra Times, February 5, 1929, 2. 184 MLMSS 1261/4. 185 Horace H. Spooner, Illustrated Sydney News, May 12, 1893. ML MSS1261/4. 186 Hendy-Pooley to Mitchell, January 9, 1899, ML MSSA1461/172.; Grace Hendy-Pooley, Index to the Sydney Gazette 1803-1825 (inclusive) (Sydney: G. Hendy-Pooley, 1913); Grace Hendy-Pooley, Index to the Sydney Gazette 1803-1842 (Sydney: G. Hendy-Pooley, 1916). 187 Hendy-Pooley to Mitchell, January 6, 1899, ML MSSA1461/171.

233 Australian history. ‘He not only hunted up dozens of original documents to help me to greater accuracy, but read through all the proofs himself, and made very valuable suggestions.’188 According to Jose, this was typical of Mitchell. Meanwhile, in London when Lord Brabourne sold the remaining Banks Papers at Sotheby’s, a successful bidder at their sale in April 1886 was the Australian bookseller Edward Augustus Petherick (1847-1917). Petherick spent his life in the book trade; he was sent to London by Melbourne bookseller George Robertson to buy stock and from 1882 personally collected printed items relating to Australia’s early history.189 He bought 20 lots from the Brabourne sale including Banks' thoughts on the manners of the women of Tahiti.190 Born in England and raised in Melbourne, English-born Petherick began work at George Robertson’s Melbourne bookshop when fifteen. Appreciating Thomas Carlyle’s remark that the true university of the day was a collection of books and with a university education out of reach to him, Petherick gained his education through reading Robertson’s stock.191 Being asked often for books and information about Australia, he thought of compiling a work of reference on the subject and planned what grew into a bibliography of Australasia and Polynesia. As Petherick recalled, ‘works of reference on the literature of other countries were available, but nothing to speak of on Australia or this part of the World. George Robertson dealt only in new books, he did not keep any stock of old books, and local literature was mostly in pamphlet form issued at the Authors’ cost by local printers.’192 Like Mitchell, Petherick watched the interest and demand for colonial publications grow. Petherick’s history provides insights into the extent of Australian historical interest in the years surrounding the centenary and in the subsequent decade. During the early 1880s, Petherick catalogued the library that belonged to the London shipping merchant and collector Stephen William Silver (1819-1905). His library of close to 6,500 colonial books and manuscripts was known as the York Gate Geographical and

188 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 469. 189 He claimed to have personally handled half a million old and new books during his long book- selling career. Hendy-Pooley, Manuscript on Petherick, ML MSS1261/4. 190 Banks’ correspondence was divided into several lots on an alphabetical basis. Petherick bought the four lots comprising letters of writers whose names started with C, F, K and P. Sotheby’s, March 11 and April 14 April, 1886. See National Library of Australia, Papers of Sir Joseph Banks 1745-1820, NLA MS9. 191 NLA MS760/13/56. 192 Hendy-Pooley, MLMSS 1261/4.

234 Colonial Library, named after Silver’s Regent’s Park home.193 Having published emigrants’ handbooks to Britain’s colonies, Silver’s collection was rich in colonial material especially from Australia and New Zealand. Treasures gathered over fifty years related to geography and travel included rare atlases, explorers’ accounts, colonial histories and handbooks. Silver owned items bought from sales of the collections of William Beckford and Michael Wodhull (whom Dibdin had praised so highly).194 The earliest book in Silver’s collection was a 1482 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia. This was printed in Florence in around 1480 by Nicolo Todescho (c.1477-1485), who first printed from copper plate engravings. With thirty-one maps, this book was a monument of typography and the engraver’s art. After Silver’s death, his York Gate Library was bought en bloc at an estimated price of £2,000 for the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia.195

In 1887, Petherick issued his book circular The Torch. A bookseller’s promotion, this listed new colonial publications. To him, bibliography was relatively unknown in Australia but, since books were ‘now in every one’s hands and a bookcase is part of the furniture of every home’, he envisaged increased call for knowledge about books.196 He fixed his sights on the approaching centenary. Petherick traded as a bookseller at Paternoster Row, calling his business the ‘Colonial Bookseller’s Agency’. Initially retailing books, he became a wholesaler. He set himself up from 1888 with £500 capital as a distributing agency for London publishers, opening branches as E. A. Petherick & Co. in Melbourne (1888), Sydney (1889) and Adelaide (1891). The Federal Bank of Australia considered as credible his claim to have disposed of £250,000 of ‘high class’ literature in the Australian colonies, and allowed him to draw about £2,500 monthly against his Australian

193 Edward Augustus Petherick, Catalogue of the York Gate Library formed by Mr. S. William Silver, an index to the literature…maritime and inland discovery, commerce and colonisation, 2nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1886) (DSM/Q016.91/Y). Petherick first catalogued the library in 1882. 194 Beckford’s collection went to his son-in-law the Duke of Hamilton; the Hamilton collection was sold progressively through 1882-1883. On the sale see Carter, Books and Book Collectors, 29; on Beckford, 22-31. 195 The Society was founded in 1885. The purchase was funded from donations and the volumes were shipped free by Elder Smith and Co. It was housed in the “New Wing” of the South Australian Institute building, which opened in December 1908. See NTT&G, December 11, 1908, 3. Petherick wrote Silver’s obituary for the Royal Geographical Society of which Silver was a long-standing member. E. A. P. ‘Stephen William Silver’, The Geographical Journal 25, no. 4 (April 1905): 465-6. 196 E. A. Petherick, The Torch and Colonial Book Circular (London: Petherick, 1889) Vol. 2, No. 7, 93. (DSM/Q015/T).

235 shipments.197 But he fell into debt, owing close to £52,000 by August 1893. Petherick hoped to be bailed out by William Silver and London private collector Sir Henry Tate, but both lost heavily in Australian securities during the financial crisis of the early 1890s. Petherick went into receivership in 1894.198 From the wreck of his business, Petherick managed to salvage his own extensive private library of around 7,000 colonial items. This consisted of books, pamphlets, newspapers and maps. A Fellow of the Literary Society and the Royal Geographical Society, Petherick collected this material in order that he might compile from it a bibliography of Australasia and Polynesia. From 1894, he devoted himself to this task and began classifying details of all known publications since 1500 that related to Australia. Like Bonwick, Petherick possessed information gathered from searches made in London’s Record Office, the Colonial Office and Royal Colonial Institute, besides the British Museum, Paris National Library, and other continental libraries. With particulars of over 30,000 titles, he believed no other country could boast of such a work as his bibliography.199 Drawing on Dibdin, Petherick took a broad view of literary classification and bibliography that meant having an overview of the relations and interdependence of books and of history. In terms of his Australasian bibliography, he knew that if his work was lost, a mine of literary wealth would be lost. Aspects of Petherick’s life mirror Mitchell’s experience and on several counts are useful for what they show us. Both considered being able to read their greatest fortune. Both men could not remember a time when they did not read. Both had fathers who were avid readers.200 Throughout their lives, both men kept books their fathers had owned. Both lived with books that had surrounded their childhood and which they preserved as part of their lives.201 Both were thoroughly familiar with the

197 Hendy Pooley, ML MSSA1261/4 198 ‘In Re Petherick’, Times, August 2, 1894, 14; April 6, 1895, 5; November 29, 1894, 14. 199 Papers of Edward Augustus Petherick 1756-1917, NLA MS760/13/14. Petherick was anticipating a centralized cataloguing scheme along the lines that he would propose to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library: Biskup, Libraries, 167-8. 200 Untitled newspaper clipping, March 6, 1913, Hendy Pooley, ML MSSA1261/4. When Petherick’s father migrated to Australia in 1852 he brought with him a box full of books containing about 400 volumes. 201 Petherick described how, when a child, he ‘got into the bigger books’. He read a folio of architectural design of the age of Queen Anne, which his father had discovered some years before in an oil shop where it was being used for parcelling soap. This was Andrea Pozzo, Rules and Examples of Perspective Proper for Painters and Architects (London: printed by Benj. Motte, 1707). This was an

236 book trade. Petherick gives a picture of its size. As Robertson’s buyer in London, Petherick shipped books to Melbourne every three months by direct auxiliary steamer, and once a month sent limited supplies in small packages by overland mail. During the twenty-three years that he was a London bookseller, he said that his shipments of books averaged nearly six tons, ‘…aggregating thirty or forty million volumes, and in value considerably over £2 million.’202 Petherick said he handled nearly £100,000 worth of books annually.203 Petherick mirrors the milieu in which Mitchell collected, where prospering communities regarded books as an essential part of their lives. Petherick described colonial communities

which had been growing up in Australia and New Zealand attaining their maturity within the short space of half a generation…possessing all the conveniences and most of the luxuries of the most civilized states…every leading town in those colonies owning its town hall, public library and mechanics institute, innumerable churches, banks, post offices, mercantile houses, often of colossal proportions, besides public schools and colleges, while the several capitals have their universities, houses of parliament and state offices, hospitals, benevolent asylums and homes. With this progress and enterprise on the part of the colonists had increased the demand for books and literature of the best sort. Instead of a few new books, all the new books were wanted, if of worth and suited to the tastes of colonial readers.204 Petherick’s emphasis on new books shows us that colonial readers generally sought modernity. They were not thinking of the past. Petherick wanted his personal library to be housed in Australia but could not afford to get it there. He offered it to the Imperial Institute at South Kensington. Placing his collection in the Institute’s Australasian Section would relieve him of the costs of storing it. Problematically, a response to his offer was delayed. He next offered the collection to ‘a federated Australia’. He wrote to the Federal Council of

edition of one of the first manuals on perspective for artists and architects, prepared by Baroque painter Andrea Pozzo (initially published in two volumes in 1693, 1698). 202 MS760/13/80. 203 Measured in the 1880s, this would be equivalent today to close to £5million, MS760/13/83. Petherick’s stock was sold to Melbourne bookseller Edward Cole (following the 1893 bank crash). 204 MS760/13/35-6.

237 Australia (1885-1899), which was chaired by the Tasmanian Premier Sir Edward Braddon (1829-1904), an enthusiastic Federalist and formerly Tasmanian Agent- General in London (1889-1893). Braddon instructed the acting Agent General in London, Sir Robert Herbert, to accept the gift and temporarily place it in the Colonial Institute under Petherick’s charge, at a nominal salary, until it could be housed in Australia. Petherick was unaware at the time that this would mean facing a long wait, for well over a decade, with little agreement in Australia where his ‘national’ collection would be housed. Three states agreed to contribute their quota for it. Victoria opposed the purchase and New South Wales never joined the Federal Council.205 While Petherick’s collection was under offer, he would find himself under pressure from New South Wales to sell his books separately and en bloc. So much of Petherick’s library duplicated Mitchell’s collection that he would not buy it.206 Petherick maintained he could not entertain any other offer until the Federal Government decided not to take his collection.207 He continued cataloguing Australiana for his bibliography and preparing bibliographical and other catalogue work for the Marylebone bookseller Francis Edwards. Both Mitchell and Petherick possessed Victorian values. Petherick was described as a living example of Carlyle’s dictum that a man’s work was his greatest ornament.208 Mitchell and Petherick also believed in honouring family. Petherick wrote, The reward of good work is primarily in the doing of it. There is no acknowledged peerage for labour. The best and truest work is done, as one of the noblest living writers [Petherick is referring to Carlyle] says for love and no higher reward than love can be given for it. Every day good men and good women perform noble deeds and pass away comparatively unknown, altogether unknown outside the limits of their personal acquaintance. Few leave even a name behind, yet the good work they do stands fast for ever. I have endeavoured to do mine…that I might bring joy and not discredit to the

205 WA, December 3, 1896, 3. 206 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 45. 207 MS760/13/130. 208 MS760/13/19.

238 parents who brought me into the world, my highest aspirations to please them; and their approbation has been to me my best reward.209 If Mitchell’s ambition was similar, it would not have been surprising. With Petherick’s collection at the Imperial Institute and seemingly leaving London for Australia, the London Times described it as ‘the most remarkable Australasian library ever formed.’ The paper regretted that Petherick’s Collection (then only half its eventual size) was to leave London as it contained hundreds of books, maps and periodicals ‘not to be found in the British Museum’.210 In 1896, Petherick’s collection was important but modest compared with Mitchell’s collection.

6.4 Mitchell’s Circle of Learning Mitchell and Petherick were not alone in their concern about how colonial history was disappearing. Bidding against Petherick at the Brabourne Sale in 1886 was Sir Saul Samuel, who bought a number of the lots for the New South Wales Government. Supported by Henry Parkes, Samuel added these to items he bought that were discovered that year in Sir Joseph Banks’ old house in Soho Square. Walled up for more than half a century, behind a temporary partition concealed by old maps of Australia, were letters by Banks with items which Banks had identified as having belonged to Captain James Cook and brought to England in the Endeavour. They carried the labels that Banks had tied to them when he used the items to illustrate a lecture he gave at the Royal Society of Cook’s voyages. Among them were navigational instruments, carvings, weapons, and heads that Cook collected during the Endeavour’s voyage.211 These were exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) in London before being sent to the Australian Museum in Sydney. When exhibited in the early 1890s, the Sydney Press said that though Cook’s name was familiar in Sydney few realised his greatness. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: ‘To most of us he looms through the mists of dead centuries along with the

209 MS760/13/61. 210 ‘A Colonial Library’, Times, January 25, 1896, 6. Ultimately, Petherick’s collection comprised 10,000 books and 6500 pamphlets: Biskup, Libraries, 146. 211 ‘Relics of Captain Cook’, MM, October 29, 1887, 3.

239 Drakes, Raleighs, Dampiers and other mighty men of long ago.’212 The paper was startled to find that Cook stood within living reach, with Cook’s widow having died just sixty years before in 1835. It pointed to Cook’s relics at the Museum, saying most were as yet unaware of them. It said they were full of ‘teaching power’: being a day- labourer’s son, Cook’s relics ‘show what is possible [by] dauntless courage and the faithful discharge of the humblest duty.’ The Herald’s surprise was not unexpected given that historical memory (including for colonial Founding Fathers) concerned few in the 1890s. In 1886 Bonwick transcribed Cook’s original 1770 log written while sailing off the Australian coast. Picking up on this, Edward Morris in Melbourne (whom Mitchell knew) intended to publish the history of Banks and Cook.213 He searched for information about the fate of the Endeavour, which he traced to Newport, Rhode Island where he thought it sank in 1778. To Morris, Banks was the ‘Father of Australia’ more than any other man. He deplored the fact that Banks, who shed much light on Australia’s early history (as the Historical Records would show), appeared to have been forgotten.214 No memorial to Banks existed in Sydney except a copper tablet placed on the rocks at Kurnell in 1821.215 This became the subject of an address that Morris gave to the Library Association meeting in 1898 when he advocated that a memorial to Banks be erected in Sydney. Mitchell knew of collections elsewhere that were assembling material from the Australasian region, particularly in New Zealand. Among them were collections assembled by William Colenso (1811-1899) (of zoological, botanical and mineral

212 ‘The Captain Cook Relics’, SMH, October 13, 1894, 4. Little interest had been taken in the sale of Cookiana in 1868 in London: Puttick and Simpson, Catalogue of a collection of valuable and interesting books, including a selection from the library of the late poet, Samuel Rogers: the manuscript journals, log books, charts and papers, of the celebrated navigator, Captain James Cook: manuscript collections relating to Kent, Berkshire and Gloucestershire, books in all classes of literature, theology, commentaries on the Scriptures, controversy, history, biography, classics, scientific works, medicine, surgery, anatomy, etc., important works in foreign languages, curious old woodcuts by Albert Durer, and other early masters, etc. etc.: which will be sold by auction, by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson ... at their house, No. 47, Leicester Square, W.C. .. on Tuesday, March 10th, and four following days (London: Messrs. Puttick and Simpson, 1868). 213 Morris and A. W. Jose were friends. Jose called Morris ‘the most romantic’ of the men Jose knew in Melbourne: Jose, Nineties, 39. 214 Professor Morris, ‘Botany of Cook’s First Voyage’, Argus, November 3, 1900, 4. Morris wrote articles on Banks and Cook, believing it was so late in the day, 80 years after the death of Banks, that their story was being told. He was appalled that so little was known of Banks. 215 ‘Sir Joseph Banks’, SMH, February 3, 1905, 4. This was inscribed to the memory of ‘James Cook and Joseph Banks the Columbus and Maecenas of their time’ and was erected in the first year of the Philosophical Society of Australasia in 1821.

240 specimens); Alexander Turnbull (1868-1918) (known for his collection of Miltoniana and interest in Scottish literature and history, but who held special interest in Australiana); and Thomas Morland Hocken (1836-1910) (who was building a near- complete body of New Zealand printed material). Hocken bought from George Robertson, who had Hocken looking out for material for Mitchell. Hocken and Mitchell exchanged material. Mitchell came to know Sydney businessman Alfred Lee (1858-1923) through fellow Sydney University graduate William Yarrington and Frank Bladen, who both knew Lee well. He was an enthusiastic self-made man, as businessman, sportsman, amateur historian and serious book collector. Born near Dublin, Lee was taken in his childhood to New Zealand. His father received a land grant there in 1867 after serving in the Crimean War. After being educated at Christchurch and Auckland Grammar, Lee sought his future in Sydney where he arrived with £10 when aged 16. He joined an Australian boot-making company that had been established since 1851, and quickly became their Australian manager, then senior partner.216 In 1879, Lee married the Sydney-born nineteen year old Minnie Dodds. She was an avid reader with keen interest in Australia’s history. They settled in Bondi and raised five children. Their daughter, in a later account of her parents’ achievements, spoke of the influence Frank Bladen exercised in fanning their interest in the early history of Australasia and book collecting.217 Over a period of almost twenty years, the Lees amassed a collection of Australiana. Lee built a 10,000 volume library, collecting books and manuscripts from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, from which Minnie drafted a 700 page unpublished history and table of memorable dates.218 It is a mark of Mitchell’s approach that he and Lee became firm friends. Lee enjoyed discussion on moot points of Australian history and they spent many hours together chatting and examining sources.219 For as historian Raymond Irwin observes reading is essentially a social habit from which the discussion and criticism of the

216 Enoch Taylor & Co continues to exist today. The success of the business was based on comfortable lasts to their work boots and riding boots. http://www.tboots.com.au/ (accessed August 12, 2010). 217 Lee family papers, 1729-1972 Vol. ML MSS. 2903/18. 218 Lee, Minnie ‘Minerl’ (M. Lee), History of Australia (Sydney: unpublished, 1889), ML MSS2903/1. Minnie Lee worked with Rose Scott and was well-known in Sydney for her charity work. 219 ‘Mr Alfred Lee, Sportsman and bookcollector’, SDT, 11 August 1923.

241 material being read occurs.220 Mitchell and Lee agreed to give each other first refusal on their collections, agreeing that neither should be sold or parted with (other than to each other), and so would be kept in the same state as they were when they compared notes. Through the 1890s Mitchell was seeing William Astley (1855-1911). Another hunter after Australia’s past, Astley was a journalist. Writing under the name of “Price Warung”, he wrote fictional short stories that drew on Australia’s early history. Three instalments of a series he wrote on the history of bushranging appeared in the Bulletin between August and September of 1892. A collection of his short stories, Half-crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine (1898), was issued as a title in Robertson’s Colonial Library after appearing in the columns of the Bulletin.221 Like Petherick, Astley mirrors the milieu in which Mitchell collected. One story, Dictionary Ned, is about the love of the book, as owned by a foundling. Common-man Ned “was a beggar to learn”. He owned a single treasured book – a nine-penny dictionary bought twenty-five years before from Cole’s bookstall at Paddy’s Market in Melbourne’s Bourke Street. Ned is much ridiculed. Other men jeer at him: Devoted student! While other “whalers” slumber He studies hard, does Dictionary Ned! But still he’s storing only useless lumber In the squash-pumpkin which he calls his head!.222 Sadly, hunger to read as well as being his delight caused his death. No doubt Mitchell appreciated the irony to Ned’s position compared to his own (whether intended on Astley’s part or not). Ned ‘paying nine-pence, had therewith purchased a treasure of wealth untellable, of joys limitless, and all the glorious orbs in the firmament of culture swam into his ken when he pocketed the book…the only volume he ever possessed, to him it was a library, a literature, many-volumed life itself.’223 Astley dedicated Mitchell’s copy to him in August 1899.

220 Raymond Irwin, The Origins of the Engish Library (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1958), 194. 221 Astley, February 3, 1899, Notes regarding sources in Price Warung, Tales of the Isle of Death (Norfolk Island) (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1898) (DSMA823/A855.1/4A1); Price Warung, Half-crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine (Melbourne: George Robertson & Co., 1898) (DSM/A823/A855.1/6A1). 222 Astley, Bob, 81. 223 Ibid., 75.

242 Like Mitchell, Astley respected the importance of understanding the past from primary sources. Both agreed with the English bibliographer Carew Hazlitt in the connectedness of the present-day to past times and in the value of learning from this. The past and the future were caught up in Astley’s activities. In September 1898, he worked as general editor on Clarion Call, a paper issued as an election manifesto on behalf of the pro-federation candidates running with Edmund Barton (1849-1920) (George Barton’s brother, and both childhood neighbours to Mitchell) during the General Election of 1898. As a convinced Federalist, Mitchell agreed with the slogan heading the paper’s issues: ‘when neighbouring peoples severed not by antagonisms of race, but only by the artificial lines of geographers, are conscious of moral and social unity, every day that postpones their political unity, may prove a day of disaster’.224 In 1896 Astley instigated the Bathurst Federation League, a campaign of popular education to air the principles and details of Federalism. Astley stressed the importance of educating Australians about the nature (and advantages) of Federal Government, and the history of Federal systems. He saw this as one of the most pressing duties then facing those in public life and public-spirited citizens.225 Mitchell agreed. Astley is principally known for five books published between 1892 and 1898, each a collection of short stories, largely based on Australia’s convict past. He identified with the convict past, as in Tales of the Old Regime, and the Bullet of the Fated Ten (1897). This material struck a nerve, and Astley was criticised on the grounds that his references could not be historically accurate. However, Astley clearly possessed more information about the past than most and took pains to declare his sources.226 The Bulletin wrote that Astley studied early Australia for twenty years, over which time he formed a unique collection of manuscripts with an index of nearly

224 William Astley, September 7, 1899, 34, Memorandum by William Astley as to “Clarion Call”, Willam Astley Papers ML MSS250. This paper was issued as an election manifesto during the General Election of 1898 on behalf of the Bartonian candidates in Sydney’s eastern electoral divisions Astley was general editor. 225 Bathurst Federation League Records, 1896, ML MSS1163. The League intended to prepare a report for the populace that defined Federal principles based on the Draft Bill to Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia as adopted by the Convention of 1891. 226 Astley to Parkes, April 17, 1895, Parkes Correspondence, Vol. 2, 14. Astley was then working on popular history of New South Wales, which never eventuated.

243 300,000 entries.227 A letter from Astley to Mitchell dated 1894 shows that Mitchell drew on Astley’s knowledge.228 Mitchell’s respect for Marcus Clarke’s Old Stories Retold (which he lent to Banjo Paterson) stemmed from their being ‘worked up from the early records of this colony’.229 It is considered that Astley’s use of actual occurrences and characters would not have been possible without thorough research. Astley claimed to own historic papers, which he referred to when writing about the convict past.230 Astley spoke of having perused hundreds of thousands of printed and manuscript pages (for example those relating to Norfolk Island convict settlement when preparing Tales of the Isle of Death (1898)). In the manuscript for that book, he mentioned his ‘investigation of books, manuscripts and viva voce testimony, the last, being communicated to me by former officials and convicts’.231 Astley said factual episodes underlay each of his stories. He claimed to have communicated with over 800 people ‘on the ‘system’ of the Transport Epoch.’232 If this sounds like an exagerration Astley, like Mitchell, was particular by nature. Astley was reputedly conscientious about his writing and assiduous in his work (as for Federation).233 He had extensive contacts and there is no doubt that he applied himself to thorough collection of material.234 A letter from the poet John Farrell answering Astley’s questions about Farrell’s own early history shows us how Astley collected information and suggests that Astley could easily have held many more similar letters.235 Astley was often at Sydney’s Public Library where for a while he was given a special table in one of the staff rooms. Like the history-hunter Bonwick, whose hunting after sources was considered

227 ‘Tales of the Early Days by Price Warung’, Bulletin, February 13, 1892, 21. 228 Astley to Mitchell, August 29, 1894, ML MSSA1461/157. 229 Kendall, ‘Obituary’ SM, August 13, 1881, 277. This may have been Marcus Clarke, Old Tales of a Young Country (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & McCutcheon, 1871) (DSM/990.1/177A1), of which Mitchell held two copies. 230 Astley may have been looking out for (even collecting) material for Mitchell as a note from him to Mitchell scribbled in February 1899 suggests. Astley to Mitchell, February 6, 1899, ML MSSA1461/178. The nature and whereabouts of Astley’s collection is unknown. 231 Astley, February 3, 1899, Isle of Death. 232 Astley, February 3, 1899, Isle of Death. Astley applied for the position of Editor of the Historical Records and was in touch with P. G. King, G. B. Barton, Andrew Houison, William Wools and Thomas Whitley. Correspondence with them and notes Astley made from historical sources, William Astley Papers 1888-1893 ML MSS 250 1(2). 233 Irving, Centenary, 153. 234 Ibid., 62. 235 Farrell to Astley, undated letter, ML Aa9/1,7. Astley applied for the position of Editor of the Historical Records and was in touch with P. G. King, G. B. Barton, Andrew Houison, William Woolls and Thomas Whitley. Correspondence with them and notes that Astley made from historical sources can be found in: William Astley Papers 1888-1893 ML MSS 250 1(2).

244 unorthodox by officials, Astley was misunderstood because he was applying historical investigation to his fiction. Relying on the then little-recognised tool of oral history, he imaginatively reconstructed history with characters often introduced by their real names and official documents supporting incidents.236 Rather than inventing history, as he was accused of doing, Astley was presenting history in a new way. The real problem for Astley was that he was drawing on a past that most people preferred to ignore. Convictism did not fit within the picture of Australia’s advance. When Henry Parkes’ criticized Tales of the Convict System (1892), Astley argued that the convict system was an historic episode and therefore its ‘spirit’ should be preserved in fiction.237 Rarely in agreement, Parkes and his rival Sir John Robertson shared convictions about the convict past remaining ‘secret’. For this reason Sir John Robertson issued orders to burn the Colony’s records of early settlement. They were, as Martin Brennan put it, ‘chronicles of an unparalleled period of cruelty and tyranny’.238 Astley and Mitchell both thought that, if progress implies advance over what passed before, and the use of history was (as Emerson observed) to invest the present with value, then surely pride could be found in what had been achieved from the colonial past, particularly convictism. In 1897, this truth remained too close for comfort for the socially ambitious. Mitchell knew that Australia’s European past was too close to be viewed properly. Generally holding a poor opinion of most Australian historians, he believed that ‘in a few generations the convict system will take its proper place in the perspective and our historians will pay better attention to the pioneers.’239 He foresaw that every detail of the uncomfortable past ‘would be of much greater interest than now’ and regarded his accumulation of Australian printed matter and memorials as ‘a service of real value to his native country.’240 Astley defended his historical references in his preface to Tales of the Isle of Death. He found support for his book on Norfolk Island in legal circles. Sir Charles Lilley (1827-1897), formerly Chief Justice of Queensland and several times Premier,

236 Astley claimed that for Tales of the old regime he relied on a senior warden whom he interviewed: Price Warung, Tales of the old regime and the bullet of the fated ten (Melbourne: George Robertson and Co., 1897) (DSM/A823/A855.1/3A1). 237 Astley to Parkes, November 9, 1892, Parkes Correspondence, Vol.1, 447-449a. ML A871. 238 Martin Brennan, Reminiscences of the gold fields, and elsewhere in New South Wales: covering a period of forty-eight years' service as an officer of police (Sydney : William Brooks, 1907), 291. 239 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 42-3. 240 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 52.

245 gave Astley permission to acknowledge his support for Astley’s work. Astley said that Lilley recognized the essential truth and historical accuracy of his narratives of early Australian days. Sensitive to the criticism he received, Astley was content to place Lilley’s view against the criticism he received. He said the criticism that his accounts were ‘characterized by anti-official bias’ was ‘inspired by the amplest ignorance of official documents’.241 He would not have history skewed. Astley, who was particular about sources, wrote: ‘If the material of the history to be compiled by that oft referred to individual, the historian of the future, be the Daily Telegraph files, then indeed will some Walpole of the time to come have to ejaculate, “Read me anything but history; that must be false.”’242 Here Astley is referring to what commonly passed for ‘history’. In the 1880s, one school of thought was that Australians were spared from history. As James Hingston of the Melbourne Argus wrote, ‘Australia is the happy place, and Australians the happy people that, alike, have no history. Although there is no work here for the historian, there is plenty for one who can write ‘Short essays upon great subjects.’’243 Mitchell and Astley disagreed with this and called for truth in history. As Mitchell could have reminded Astley, George Grote believed that to ensure truth, ‘an historian is bound to produce the materials upon which he builds, be they never so fantastic, absurd, or incredible’.244 German historian Leopold von Ranke (whose history of England reached Mitchell after publication in 1875) thought history should be written the way it was – by eyewitness accounts (like those Astley claimed to draw from). Astley and Mitchell were both patriotic. They knew how vital it was to catch accounts before they disappeared. As late as 1893 the London (and formerly Melbourne-based) journalist Arthur Patchett Martin (1851-1902) summed up the difficulty in the preface to his True Stories from Australasian History. While English- born, Martin lived all his life in Melbourne and only left Australia when aged 32

241 Warung, Isle of Death, Preface. 242 ‘To the electors of Woollahra’, Clarion Call, July 26, 1898, 4; ‘The historian of the future’, Clarion Call, July 26, 1898, 2. 243 James Hingston, The Australian Abroad on Branches from the Main Routes around the World (Melbourne: William Inglis and Co., 1879), viii (DSM/910.4/H). Sydney bookseller James Tyrrell relates how Sydney University Professor of History Arnold Wood held a similar view that Australia lacked history, in Tyrrell, Old Books, Old Friends, 151. 244 Mrs. Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote (London: John Murray, 1873), 169 (DSM/928.28/G).

246 following a bitter divorce. He had worked with Henry Keylock Rusden (George Rusden’s brother) in Melbourne and from London remained keenly interested in Australia. In his book, Martin moved a step ahead of Hingston’s belief that Australia had no history.245 The problem with identifying this history was the shortage of original sources. This was of particular interest to men like Mitchell, who were chasing the truth to Australia’s European discovery, exploration and settlement. Darlinghurst- born Edward Stack (1846-1913), a close friend of Mitchell, called for an Australian Historical Association.246 Keenly interested in historical research, Stack had an extensive knowledge of early days of Australia, particularly of Sydney. A precise man, he was in charge of the maps and plans room in the Lands Department from the early 1870s. He drew on the rich store of historical detail that he was in touch with there; additionally he gained many anecdotes of bygone times from those searching this material while later working in the Department’s compiling branch. In the 1890s the Sydney’s skyline was rapidly changing. Structures like the General Post Office (1891), Hotel Australia (1891), and the Victoria Markets (1898) towered above earlier mainly two-storied buildings. Demolition set old memories wandering. A spate of reminiscences from those who could remember the 1830s and 1840s appeared in the press. Beyond these, the comparative lack of interest in old landmarks being removed was taken by the press as evidence of how ‘completely the generation that took a personal interest in these things is disappearing.’247 This was not surprising from the 1891 census, with the bulk of the population aged under forty and the largest age group being those aged between twenty-five and thirty.248 Stack’s letters to the Sydney Morning Herald reveal him to be a man of good sense and community spirit and his argument for an historical society was undoubtedly to offset the disappearance of history before they could discover it.249

245 Arthur Patchett Martin, True Stories from Australian History (London: Griffith Farran & Co., 1893), 6. 246 ‘Disappearing Sydney’, SMH, April 27, 1900, 8; Stack’s obituary described him as an intimate friend of Mitchell’s: Obituary, SMH, January 9,1913; ‘Forgotten Sydney, SMH, November 27, 1896, 3; Stack’s role in the formation of the Australian Historical Society, and the momentum leading to it, which Mitchell was aware of, is described in Fletcher, Australian History, 42-45. 247 “Forgotten Sydney”, SMH, October 24, 1896, 4. 248 Census, 1891, 2, Table 1, Ages Number of persons at each period of age: the largest age group in the population was aged 25-30. 249 ‘Castle Hill and Dural Railway’, SMH, August 9,1887, 8; ‘Public Reserve Church Hill’, SMH, November 14, 1888, 7.

247 With the establishment of the Australian Historical Society in March 1901, Mitchell served as patron with Alfred Lee as Vice-President (1901-1902) and Councilor (1904). At their respective homes they discussed the formation of the Society outside of the provisional committee meetings that were arranged for that purpose.250 When formed, Lee entertained members at his home. A small and inter- related group, with only 26 financial members in 1904, Mitchell’s erstwhile friends William Yarrington and Edward Stack were among them. The society included others who were part of Mitchell’s ‘circle of learning’. These were medical practitioner Dr. Andrew Houison (1850-1912); nativist campaigner, secretary of the Australasian Federation League of New South Wales, and retired public servant Edward Dowling (1843-1912); surveyor John Frederick Mann (1819-1907); and engineer and educationist Norman Selfe (1839-1911), who collected old maps of Sydney. Another was Joseph Maiden (1859-1925), the first curator of Sydney’s technological museum and permanent honorary secretary to the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science. The Association was linked to the Australian Economic Association: both were testing grounds for ideas.251 Like Mitchell, these men were accumulating knowledge in a subject that they felt was slipping from their grasp. As one report said, ‘Those who know Sydney well can tell long stories of landmarks going and gone, but those who know all the anecdotes belonging to them are few.’252 Stack, Mitchell and John Mann were of a dwindling number of people in Sydney who could carry their minds back to the city 60 years ago.253 Their first annual report noted this: The march of progress is sure; time is no respecter of persons or things, and the old buildings, around which cluster the memories of other days, when such scientific discoveries and developments as electricity, the telephone, the steam engine, and many other aids to business life were unknown and undreamt of, will shortly pass

250 Keith Johnson, http://www.rahs.org.au/yarr-lee.htm (accessed May 24, 2009); Lee frequently visited Mitchell in Darlinghurst Road. Minnie Lee and Rose Scott were friends. 251 The Australian Association for the Advancement of Science was established in 1888. It became the present Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS). Butlin, Australian Economist, xiv. 252 “Forgotten Sydney” by an Undeveloped Fogey’, SMH, October 24, 1896, 4. 253 Mann had been second-in-command to Leichhardt in 1846.

248 away into oblivion, and their very shape and form be forgotten.’254

The older Sydney was disappearing before their eyes. They were angered too by indifference. Edward Morris, when visiting Sydney, closely compared for his Lives of Cook and Banks the original journal of Sir Joseph Banks which Alfred Lee owned and the transcript copy which was presented to the Australian Museum.255 He spent time over references owned by Mitchell who, with his grandfather’s link to Banks, appreciated Banks’s significance. When addressing the Library Association in 1898, Morris stressed Banks’s importance and called that this be signified in lasting form. An editorial for the Sydney Morning Herald replied that the most lasting memorial Banks could have is Sydney itself. The paper dismissed Morris’ call that Banks’s significance to Australia be remembered and memorialised. It was ‘not a matter for deep concern that here and there the rushing world should be somewhat tardy to place a bust in its niche of fame…The world had not time or discrimination to recognise any but the most prominent of its doers.’ In the opinion of the paper remembering Banks ‘does not seem to matter very much.’256 Debate along these lines simmered. In 1905 a member of the Historical Society reminded the Herald that few histories existed. Indeed, few accounts appeared on Banks during the nineteenth century and these were published before 1855 and therefore would not have been easy to find.257 Waiting for Morris’ history on the lives of Banks and Cook to appear, the writer said that this would offer an easily accessible opportunity to judge the work of those two men. Interest in Banks was appropriate to Historical Society members because Banks was an active antiquary surrounded by cognoscenti who saw themselves as discoverers. Clearly, Historical Society members saw themselves following this model. Enthusiasm among members of the society was high. In 1901 they presented papers on early colonial printers (Dowling), the administration of Governor Philip (Yarrington), Old St. Philip’s Church (Houison), Governor Hunter (Bladen), and Hyde Park (Stack). Edward Stack read two papers by Grace Hendy-Pooley on military defences, exploration and settlements. They were turning attention to the

254 Royal Australian Historical Society, Papers of the R.A.H.S. Annual Typescript reports and printed reports 1901-14, Annual Report, No. 1 (1901), 3. 255 ‘Sir Joseph Banks’ SMH, January 30, 1905, 8. Morris’ manuscript was never published. 256 Editorial, SMH, October 8, 1898, 8-9. 257 ‘A member of the Historical Society’, Letter to the editor, SMH, January 26, 1905, 8.

249 significance of physical remains and studying them (though their papers might appear slim today). Members inspected historic sites at Parramatta and The Rocks area, remnants of ‘Old Sydney’ that were fast disappearing. The Rocks area was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as the cradle of Australia, where many of its buildings were condemned and demolished. Fears that evidence of Sydney’s early days would be swept away prompted the work of Historical Society members and they photographed what they could. Their interest in Australia’s past and their discoveries would benefit Australia’s history in the way the discoveries made by eighteenth century British antiquarians benefitted British history. Andrew Houison built up a collection of lantern slides illustrating historic buildings and sites as they were before being demolished. He presented these in public lectures that were widely attended.258 As well as discussing Australia’s early history among themselves, they circulated details of it to others. Men like Dowling and Selfe (who were focused on education) were concerned about the declining number after 1893 of secondary school students taking modern subjects like History and Geography.259 Like Mitchell, Norman Selfe extolled the example to be learned from early colonial documents, finding details within them of wonderful advances made in early days compared to the malaise of his own time.260 Selfe outlined the history of colonial engineering in the annual address delivered to the Engineering Section of the Royal Society of New South Wales, in June of 1900. He gave Mitchell a copy, in thanks for his help. Journalist and historian, Arthur Wilberforce Jose (1863-1943) also acknowledged the help he received from Mitchell, as with his writing A short history of Australia (1899). Few individuals with Mitchell’s references let alone degree of knowledge of colonial background existed, nor were as accessible. He followed the rereading of history that evolved from changing ways of knowing and thinking about

258 ‘Reminiscences of old Sydney’, SMH, April 29, 1899, 10; ‘Young Men’s Christian Association, Lecture by Dr A. Houison’ SMH, May 30, 1900, 10. 259 Burns, Secondary Education, Appendix E.2, 590-5 and 214. Following the depression of the 1890s, students taking History and Geography fell from 82% to 62% and from 84% to 71% respectively. On anxieties about Victorian educational ideals see Dinah Birch, Our Victorian education (Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2008). 260 Norman Selfe, ‘Sydney and its institutions: as they are and might be from an engineer's point of view’, Engineers Association of New South Wales Proceedings Vol. 15 (September 1900), 19-44. (Sydney: Publisher, 2005). Selfe particularly lamented the inertia of the state.

250 history. Practicing history went from a chronological ordering, like that observed in the early eighteenth century by bibliographer and antiquary Joseph Ames (bap.1687- 1759), to evaluating detail, as practiced later that century by print collector and biographer James Granger (bap.1723-1776). Chronology developed into narrative albeit largely linked to politics. Focus later widened beyond the rise and decline of rulers. History written with thematic emphasis arose. Henry Hallam’s constitutional history of England (1827) stressed continuity found in Britain’s history. Other historians whom Mitchell read worked from collections of papers, like Peelite Philip Henry Stanhope, Lord Mahon (1777-1859), whose seven volumed history of England (1836-1854) was regarded as the standard work on the eighteenth century.261 Archival reference fostered objectivity. Mitchell could see attention turning in Australia to local interest not unlike the way that Britain’s own national story was uncovered and made clearer by antiquarians (with his great-great-grandfather among them). This came home during 1897. After searching for seven years, James Bonwick discovered in a churchyard in Bath, the grave of Governor Arthur Philip, who began European settlement in Australia. Australian antiquarians were opening up Australia’s European history like the British antiquarians before them had been the impetus to Britain knowing its history.

261 Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, from the accession of Henry V11 to the death of George 11, 6th ed. (London: J. Murray, 1850) (DSM/3432.42/H). Lord Mahon (Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope), History of England from the peace of Utrecht to the peace of Versailles, 1713-1783 (London: J. Murray, 1836-54).

251 Chapter Seven Cultural Creation: Ensuring the Mitchell Library

Reconstructing records from early colonial history entailed joint-effort between individuals and representatives of the state. This example would become valuable toward the close of the century in the fiscally restricted climate that came with financial depression. Diminished Government resources turned the Public Library into another front where joint-effort would become important. The principle of joint- effort would need to be refined if a cultural institution like the Public Library was to develop. In her focus on the development at this time of natural history museums, Susan Sheets-Pyenson describes this late-century period as a crucial time for cultural institutions like museums and libraries. As she sees it, the window of opportunity that turn-of-the-century benefaction brought to cultural institutions did not present again for some time owing to the repercussions of WWl and world-wide Depression. In this light, Mitchell’s gift to the New South Wales Public Library can be viewed as a case study of the problems that were encountered in the early history of the museum and library movement particularly in terms of developing Australian cultural institutions. While this history has been covered before, few accounts give a sense of the complexities that existed in establishing the joint-effort principle nor of the relationship and dance between individual benefactors, public expectations, government timidity and inertia, and the fledgling professions that existed in the early history of cultural institutions at this time. As Mitchell would encounter, despite all the rhetoric of self-sufficiency and modern progress ‘giving’ was far from straightforward. Sense of this awkward dance comes through the phrasing used then to describe it: ‘personal initiative and State aid [have] joined hands; in this domain at least Individualism and Socialism [have] kissed each other; the one and the many have combined for the advantage of all and some.’1 His experience illustrates some of the difficulties that cultural philanthropy faced at the time. This chapter begins by setting the context in which Mitchell’s gift is located, and explaining the general background to the importance of private gifts like his. Philanthropic practice, the principle of joint effort, is outlined before turning to

1 Bladen, Historical Notes, 82.

252 Sydney’s Public Library and to Mitchell’s gift. This is placed in the context of contemporary developments within the Museum and Library Movement. The last section of this chapter considers the relationship between librarian and bibliophile and touches on how Mitchell has been read.

7.1 A Time for New Philanthropy As we have seen, Mitchell’s philanthropic impulse ran deeper than a ‘strategy’ to advance his social standing or to compete with other elites (in the sense that Thomas Adam contends).2 Mitchell resembled Baroness Coutts, whose activism was underpinned by memories of the paternalism that her father demonstrated to her as a rural squire and as supporter of parliamentary reform to provide greater participation for the laboring classes.3 Mitchell was similarly imprinted by his father’s example (demonstrated by James Mitchell’s support of social ventures like the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary). Like his father, Mitchell never forgot the principle of ‘duty to others’.4 Also encoded in him was family sympathy for a socially democratic ethos. Like Baroness Coutts, Mitchell became notable among philanthropists. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw a new note to philanthropy struck by public-spirited men like Mitchell. They show that they were responsive to the voice of labour that called for new solutions to politics and to philanthropy. Their benefactions show the focus that was directed at the time to education. The universities were the greatest beneficiaries of their generosity, reflecting the belief in education as a moral and cultural force (Appendix 11).5

2 Adam, ‘Transatlantic Trading: The Transfer of Philanthropic Models’, 349; For an earlier nineteenth century suspicion about philanthropy being used by the rich to atone for their way of acquiring wealth see Robert Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 44. 3 Edna Healey, ‘Coutts, Angela Georgina Burdett-, suo jure Baroness Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32175 (accessed 25 Aug 2011); idem, Lady Unknown, The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978), 55, and on observing the dangers in giving anonymously, when gifts intended to relieve poverty were often misappropriated by unscrupulous agents (illustrating reason for the establishment of the COS): 46; Clara Burdett Patterson, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Victorians (London: John Murray, 1953), 26. 4 A. W. Jose alleged that Mitchell stipulated that the Mitchell Wing of the Public Library be named after his father: Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 459, cited by Fletcher, Obsession, 20. 5 As was believed by Ormond. See, Charles Stuart Ross, Francis Ormond: pioneer, patriot, philanthropist (London: Melville & Mullen, 1912); Colin Macdonald, Francis Ormond (Melbourne: Historical Society of Victoria, 1941); Peter Tregear, The Foundation of the Ormond Chair of Music (Parkville, Vic: Ormond College, University of Melbourne, 1992).

253 Whether prompted by faith, social concern or other motives, Australians across the colonies gave generously, including to overseas causes. Donations went to the 1846 Irish famine, the 1858 Indian mutiny, and the 1889 London dock strike. Responding to the relief fund in 1862 for the Lancashire manufacturing districts (suffering from disrupted cotton supplies due to the American Civil War), the Australian colonies gave £58,464 in relief, outdoing per head contributions sent from North America.6 The generosity of Elizabeth Austin (1821-1910) in Victoria was extolled as ‘an honourable example of practical Christian widowhood’, giving colonists ‘an illustration of the power of individual sacrifice.’7 In 1882 she set up a hospital for incurables, and in 1887 established refuges for women. Benefactions like hers, establishing what became community institutions, set an important example. Late in the century some of the wealth obtained in Australia by owner of the profitable Moonta mine Sir Walter Hughes, and Adelaide wool-seller and pastoralist Sir Thomas Elder was returned to the community. With Robert Barr Smith, Elder built the firm Elder Smith into one of the world's largest pastoral agencies; their empire exceeded Scotland in area with interests in mining and pastoral activity.8 Enthusiastically embracing colonial life, Elder financed Central Australian exploration, although it has been suggested that he spent the wealth of the firm rather than his own capital.9 Elder liked the grand gesture and his gifts of £25,000 each for the foundation of Working Men’s Homes and to the South Australian Art Gallery gained him the honour that he no doubt desired.10 When Elder died in March 1897, he left rich bequests to many Adelaide institutions, including over £90,000 to the

6 R. B. Walker, Funds across the Sea: Philanthropic assistance from Australia to the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century’, JRAHS 68, no. 2 (September 1982): 111. 7 ‘Elizabeth Austin’s Cottages at Geelong’, Argus, August 16, 1887, 7; ‘A Great Benefactress, Death of Mrs. E. A. Austin’, Argus, September 3, 1910, 17. 8 Hughes, Walter Watson, Will 1885-1886, NLA MS 2746; University of Adelaide, Address to the Hon. Thomas Elder from the University of Adelaide, 1874, online at http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/digitised/elder/index.html (accessed August 18, 2010). 9 Robert Linn, ‘Sir James Elder’ in R. T. Appleyard & C. B. Schedvin, Australian Financiers: Biographical Essays (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988), 101-2; Ernest Giles, E. Giles's explorations, 1875-6, proceedings of the Hon. Thos. Elder's Expedition under the command of Ernest Giles, from Perth to Adelaide (Adelaide: Government. Printer, 1877); idem, The Journal of a Forgotten Expedition (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas & Co., 1880) (DSM/983.7/G); Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition (1891-1892), Journal of the Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition, 1891-1892 under the command of D. Lindsay (Adelaide: C.E. Bristow, 1893); Council of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Handbook of instructions for the guidance of the officers of the Elder Scientific Exploration Expedition to the unknown portions of Australia (Adelaide: The Branch, 1891). 10 Elder was knighted in 1878, made K.C.M.G. in 1887, and G.C.M.G. in 1888.

254 University of Adelaide.11 Bequests like these could not have escaped Mitchell’s attention. They were notable because they greatly contributed to developing colonial institutions. They also came from men within Mitchell’s world, with a number of Scotsmen among them. One example was the gift in 1874 of £30,000 to build a hall at the University of Melbourne from the Irish-born Wimmera pastoralist Sir Samuel Wilson (1832-1895). Mitchell knew of Wilson and owned titles by Wilson.12 Likewise with Elder, whom Mitchell may well have met (with Elder being prominent in the Australian Geographic Society over which Edward Merewether presided). Similarly with other benefactors. Eadith Walker was made a life member of the Geographic Society, no doubt for funds she gave to the Society.13 Sydney merchant John Challis had served with Mitchell’s father on the board of Sydney’s Dispensary. William Manning, who secured Challis’ bequest for the University, believed the bequest was the greatest in the Empire, including England.14 It transformed the University, giving it funds it had lacked till then to establish numerous chairs in anatomy, zoology, history, law, logic and philosophy, and modern literature. Manufacturing and mining interests developed by James Mitchell and Edward Merewether and A. Walker Scott’s involvement with the railways and steam shipping linked them to the successful iron-founder, (later Sir) Peter Russell. Grateful for the success he had achieved in Sydney, Russell’s money provided scholarships and lectureships in architecture, metallurgy, mining and surveying.15 Mitchell’s nephew, the younger Edward Merewether, who enrolled at Sydney University to

11 Linn estimates that Elder left £155,000 in bequests to public institutions: Linn, Australian Financiers, 104. 12 Sir Samuel Wilson, The Angora goat with an account of its introduction into Victoria, and a report on the flock belonging to the Zoological and Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, now running at Longerenong, in the Wimmera district (Melbourne: Stillwell and Knight, Printers, 1873) (DSM/636.3/W); idem, The Californian salmon: with an account of its introduction into Victoria (Melbourne: Sands & McDougall, printers, 1878) (DSM/ 639/W); idem, Salmon at the Antipodes: being an account of the successful introduction of salmon and trout into Australian waters (London: Edward Stanford, 1879) (DSM/639/W); University of Melbourne, Proceedings on laying the Memorial Stone of the Wilson Hall of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: Stillwell and Co., 1879) (DSM/ 042/ P121). 13 The Royal Geographic Society of Australasia, Transactions and Proceedings 5 (1891-2), vii. Mitchell is listed as a member. 14 ‘Death of Merchant’, SMH, February 18, 1880; John Henry Challis, Will of the late John Henry Challis (Sydney: Printed by Gibbs, Shallard, 1880). 15 P. H. Russell, ‘Sir Peter Nicol Russell 1816-1905, his family and associates. Pioneer of the Australian Iron and Engineering History’, Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society 50, no. 1 (July 1964): 131-41; Barff, Historical Account, 147-8; Prentis, The Scots (2008), 113. Russell gave two endowments of £50,000 each, giving the second in 1905.

255 study engineering, benefitted from Russell’s bequest. Self-made Sydney property- owner and businessman Thomas Fisher, the only Australian-born benefactor among this group left £33,000 to Sydney’s University to establish a library; he also left £100 to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts.16 Sydney’s university was the greatest beneficiary of this late nineteenth-century generosity. However, two bequests to it show that generosity could be problematic. In 1890 medical practitioner and naturalist George Bennett bequeathed to the University the ornithological works of John Gould (valued at about £1000) with complete sets of scientific journals and other valuable works such as Thomas Horsfield’s (1773-1859) Zoological Researches in Java (1824) (amounting to over £2000 in value).17 He also offered his important personal library of reference works to the University for £2000. This included many presentation copies by men he had known like biologists Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), zoologist John Gray (1800-1875), and botanist William Hooker (1785-1865).18 His offer was rejected; Bennett’s collection (with a number of early books from the sixteenth century) was sold by William Dymock and dispersed by public auction.19 George Bennett’s death in 1893 followed shortly after the death of Sir William Macleay in 1891. A nephew of Alexander Macleay, William Macleay reached Sydney in 1839, where he became an open-handed patron of science. He founded the Entomological Society in 1862; was a Trustee of the Australian Museum (with James Mitchell and Walker Scott) and of the Free Public Library (1870-91); the first president of the Linneaen Society when it formed in October 1874; and sat on the University Senate from 1875. He gave his collection (valued at £23,000) to the university, with a further bequest of £12,000 to establish a chair or lectureship in bacteriology.20 The university rejected the conditions he attached to this. The money

16 ‘Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts’, SMH, August 8, 1885, 11; H. Bryan, ‘An Australian Library in the A. M.: Earlier Years of the University of Sydney Library’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 55, no. 3 (September 1969): 205-27. 17 These included the Annals and Magazine of Natural history, The Journal of the Linnean Society, The Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. ‘University of Sydney’, SMH, November 4, 1890, 6. 18 ‘An Australian Naturalist’, BC, October 17, 1983, 6. 19 John Atherton Young, Anne Jervie Sefton, Nina Webb, eds., Centenary Book of the University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1984), 55; Catalogue of a choice portion of the library of the late Dr. Geo Bennett, Sydney (Sydney: Websdale, Shoosmith & Co., 1893- 1900) (DSM/042/P69); ‘Some Valuable Books’, AA, September 11, 1909, 16. 20 The collection was housed by 1890 in the purpose-built building funded by the Government and erected to house the collection between 1886 and 1888. On the failure of the university to appreciate

256 went to the Linneaen Society, whose headquarters were built by Macleay in 1885 in Elizabeth Bay nearby Mitchell (who was a member of the Society).21 Macleay also gave the Society the Linnean Hall with the land on which it stood with a bequest of £35,000 for the establishment of four annual Linnaean Fellowships of £400 each. Henry Lawson, who recuperated at Thomas Walker’s Convalescent Hospital (which opened in 1893 on the picturesquely-situated southern bank of the Parramatta River at Concord), found nothing in the hospital of what he called ‘charity’, referring to the stigmatization and humiliation associated with the process of applying for help. His view reflects how giving to a person in need had come to be associated with conditions that recipients viewed as discriminating and oppressive; to him the Hospital (made possible by Walker’s generous bequest of £100,000) was restorative to anyone needy ‘regardless of class, race or creed’.22 It lacked the forbidding atmosphere of most charitable institutions. Lawson marvelled at Walker’s philanthropy by which (to him) ‘even wealth is free’; he called Walker’s alleviatory benefaction kindly wealth.23 As Lawson observed, these late nineteenth-century benefactors (like Walker) were defining new forms of assistance that went beyond charity (that entailed oppressive processes), and their ‘new philanthropy’ would be culturally influential. Promoting individual development from within was the vehicle by which they sought to encourage social cohesion, at a time when calls were made to expand state intervention for ‘the public good’.24 Their activities were in keeping with the gospel preached by one of the best- known philanthropists from the turn of the nineteenth-century, Fife-born American industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). He urged that wealth must be

Macleay’s gift see John M. Mackenzie, ‘Australia: museums in Sydney and Melbourne’ in Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 130. 21 In Memoriam: Sir William Macleay born at Caithness, A. B. June 13th, 1820. Died at Sydney NSW December 7, 1891 (Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1891) (DSM/A925.9/M). In 1903 when Macleay’s widow died the Society received a further £41,000 and also received 700 of Macleay’s books. 22 Mrs Charles Bright, ‘The Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital’, The Cosmos Magazine, Vol. 2 No. 2, (October 1895), 45-53; Display such as Walker’s noblesse oblige was unusual: see Shurlee Swain, ‘Philanthropy’ in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) http://www.oxfordreference.com.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t127.e11 53&srn=2&ssid=461345804#FIRSTHIT (accessed September 1, 2011). 23 Resembling the home of a wealthy family, the hospital was known as ‘a great Temple of Convalescence’: Sheena Coupe, Concord a Centenary History (Concord, N.S.W.: Council of the Municipality of Concord, 1983), 73-8. 24 For background to this in terms of the Australian context see Garton, ‘Rights’, 25.

257 returned to society to provide opportunities for those without resources who were determined to advance by their own drive.25 Their activities also resemble conclusions made from a study by Abigail Van Sluyk of three contemporaneous American library benefactors of comparable significance. She found that gifts went only to towns with which the benefactor was personally connected because they regarded themselves as ‘the patriarch of an extended family’, with the recipients of their generosity as dependant relations.26 As stewards of wealth they would not accept constraints imposed on it. Carnegie believed in the concept of stewardship, that a rich man should personally supervise the giving away of his fortune. He warned would-be philanthropists against bequests for institutions such as libraries: ‘Knowledge of results of legacies bequeathed is not calculated to inspire the brightest hopes of much posthumous good being accomplished’.27 Still, the activity of turn-of-the-century philanthropists would lead to developing and supporting cultural institutions like libraries that would both redefine the culture of giving and the cultural life of their communities. Substantial gifts of private benefactors were necessary to develop public and cultural amenities when Government showed little will to do so (apart from becoming increasingly unable to fund improved public infrastructure). Little public investment beyond the schools, jails, and necessary city offices was a feature of many later nineteenth century cities (such as in San Francisco where the city lacked the legal ability to issue bonds which were central to funding an improved public infrastructure).28 In New South Wales the government’s purpose was to create the conditions in

25 Andrew Carnegie, Round the World, (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879) (DSM/ 910/ C); idem., The Gospel of Wealth, and Other Timely Essays (London: Warne, 1901) (DS330.4/53); Mitchell also owned the books written by Carnegie’s closest friend, the historian and statesman John Morley (1838-1923): John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, First Series (London: Chapman and Hall, 1878) (DSM/804/M); John Morley, Studies in Literature (London; New York: Macmillan, 1891) (DSM/804/M). 26 Van Sluyk, ‘The Utmost Amount’, 360. 27 Richard N. Current, Pine Logs and Politics: A Life of Philetus Sawyer, 18; 176: John C. Colson, "Public Spirit" at Work: Philanthropy and Public Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Spring, 1976): 204; Andrew Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, North American Review 148 (June, 1889), 658-661. 28 In San Francisco, bibliophile mining engineer Adolph Sutro (1830-1898), owner of much city real estate and Mayor (1895-97), turned his real-estate wealth into building public amenities such as the Sutro baths on the Pacific Ocean beachfront for public use let alone a library (today’s Sutro Library of the Californian State Library): Peter Booth Wiley, A Free Library in This City, The Illustrated History of the San Francisco Public Library (San Francisco: Weldon Owen, 1996), 107.

258 which private enterprise could flourish.29 Sydney was built by a partnership of public and private enterprise in which the public authorities provided the essential services and private business created the residential, commercial and industrial building.30 Authorities had been formed (like the Metropolitan Fire Brigades Board that was constituted in 1884) to take over from insurance and volunteer brigades. Sydney’s suburban spread in the 1880s and 1890s called for a large per capita increase in investment in housing and associated public utilities.31 Improving the infrastructure of the late Victorian city would benefit the city’s quality of life. The assumption of civic responsibility extended into culture. The function of the Library was seen to provide resources for economic betterment.32 City authorities could not undertake the services that were needed. Sydney’s municipalities were weak, poor and parochial. Sydney city council was the only city authority to provide metropolitan services that council and suburban municipalities did not provide.33 Fiscal problems arose from the increasing cost of services and tensions arose for investment from public bodies relying upon limited and inflexible source of income.34 This stretched government finances further. With his classical knowledge, Mitchell knew a national library should be funded by the State. Having read about Petrarch (1304-1374), it is likely that he was mindful of this bibliophile’s intentions (for what could have been the first public library in the western world) and what became of his collection.35 By the end of his life, the great humanist owned one of the largest private libraries that existed. Literary historian Giuseppe Mazzotta claims that Petrarch, who brought the past to life, collecting the texts of ancient writers, viewed collecting books as being the actions of a custodian of memories (which it could be said was Mitchell’s purpose).36 Implied here is that Petrarch saw his work was not only to bring authors to life by unearthing

29 Fry, ‘The growth of Sydney’, 38. 30 Fry, ‘The growth of Sydney’, 37. 31 McCarty ‘Australian capital cities’, 21. 32 Horwitz, Culture, 32. 33 Fry, ‘The growth of Sydney’, 40. 34 T. R. Gourvish and Alan O’Day (eds.), Later Victorian Britain, 1867-1900 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), 43. 35 For the importance of Petrarch’s significance to the Western intellect, owing to his reviving modern literature by recovering and transcribing classical literature from Ancient Greece and Rome, and as the forerunner to Bacon in rational philosophy, see Thomas Campbell, Life of Petrarch, 1:1, 9. Mrs. Dobson, The Life of Petrarch: Collected from Memoires pour la vie de Petrarch, 5th ed. (London: Printed by T. Maiden for Vernor and Hood, 1803), 1:16 (DSM/928.51/P). 36 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1993), 17.

259 their manuscripts, but to ensure that their books could be transmitted to future generations. In 1362 he informed the Venetian authorities that he wished to present his valuable collection of manuscripts and ancient books to the Republic of Venice, on condition that it should be properly housed (funded by the State) and should never be sold or divided.37 The authors whom Mitchell read about Petrarch emphasized that he hoped his gift would encourage ‘other trusts of the same kind for the good of the public and that the citizens who loved their country would follow his example in bequeathing books’.38 His intention was to establish a public library on the concept of those of classical antiquity (as was established at the Ancient Library of Alexandria). Petrarch’s plan for his collection to become the first public library in the western world never eventuated, with his books scattered after his death.39 Mitchell mistrusted politicians hence he would entrust his collection to the Trustees of Sydney’s Public Library. He knew well several of the men who were trustees of the Public Library. He held a long connection with solicitor James Norton (1824-1906) whose solicitor father, also James Norton (1795-1862), James Mitchell knew.40 Norton was a trustee of the Free Public Library from 1878 and its chairman from 1890. He was also a founder of the Linnean Society, serving on its council (1878-79; 1881-1906), as treasurer (1882-97) and president (1899-1900). He was a member of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia. He collected Australian books.41

7.2 The Principle of Joint Effort and Cultural Change For Mitchell, events that occurred as the new century approached indicated new life and all the different conditions of it. Time and space were conquered in novel ways. In October 1896 the continent was crossed on a bicycle in 60 days.42 That month, lone sailor Joshua Slocum – the first person to sail single-handed round the world – arrived in Newcastle from Boston. Motion pictures were presented in Sydney

37 K. W. Humphreys, A National Library in theory and in practice, The Panizzi Lectures 1987 (London: The British Library, 1988), 2; Campbell, Life of Petrarch, vol.2 248. 38 As an honourable example, see Dobson, The Life of Petrarch, 2: 309; Campbell, Life of Petrarch, 2:248; Ugo Foscolo, Essays on Petrarch (London: John Murray, 1823), 151 (DSM/851.18/F). 39 Sade, Jacques Francois, Mrs Dobson, 2:311. 40 Bladen, Historical Notes, 82. 41 Bladen refers to the interest that Norton took in ‘bygone Australia’. Bladen, Historical Notes, 83. 42 Cycling, Perth to Brisbane, Virgin’s fine ride’, Argus, 12 October 1897, 6. Cyclist William Virgin cycled from Perth to Brisbane in sixty days from 1 September to 31 October 1896.

260 and Mitchell heard about the Tesla effect of X-rays and Joseph Slattery’s fluorescent screen.43 It would not be long before the Commonwealth of Australia would be proclaimed. On the first of January in 1901 at an official ceremony in Centennial Park, Edmund Barton would be sworn in as Prime Minister with the first Commonwealth Ministry. Rhetoric about nationhood was part of the lead-up to Federation; questions about nationality and national effort were foremost. Discussions about this were exchanged with friends like William Astley; educationists the engineer Norman Selfe, and Edward Dowling, a Federationist and former vice- president of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts (1869-83); and Edward Stack. Mitchell’s contact with them and with writers and researchers brought home how fragmentary were the surviving records and recollections from the past. For Mitchell, facing advancing age meant dealing with the future of his collection. Unlike the collector who blessed ‘the auctioneer who makes their inefficient catalogue’, Mitchell did not want his collection scattered in the way that Edward Wise’s collection was dispersed when sold by auctioneers after his death.44 Mitchell wished to make a great national library for his city, one that was national in the sense that from it future readers could understand the way the nation came to be.45 Nation-building was happening around him. Infrastructures that were part of this were being built, like reservoirs, bridges and roads. In amassing his library, Mitchell was building a story bank for the future. It was for this reason that he had assembled the largest purely Australian collection in existence. He saw the erection of a library building for it as part of this nation-building.46 Taking this view was logical in a period that saw the rise of public libraries.47

43 Astley to Archibald, June 27, 1896, NL MSS8675; Tony Smith, ‘A short history of the origins of radiography in Australia’, Radiography 15, Supplement 1, (December 2009): 24-7; R. J. McInerney, ‘Mathew Joseph Slattery’, Medical Journal of Australia 2, no. 9 (1970): 427. 44 ‘The property of a gentleman who has given up collecting’, The Library, A Quarterly Review of Bibliography and Library Lore, 1899. SMH, December 6, 1865, 4. 45 Anderson to Heirsemann, July 14, 1900 ML MSS; On Mitchell’s belief that the making of his library was a great service see: Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 53; ‘Death of Mr. D.S. Mitchell’, SMH, July 25, 1907, 7; Biskup, Libraries, 6; In Australia no library had the statutory title and responsibility of a national library until 1960 with the National Library Act. 46 Accordingly the conditions that Mitchell set for his library within the Public Library were modelled on those established at the British Library. This was the original model of a large independent, self- sufficient store of materials, for which British Museum librarian Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879) was partly responsible: Humphreys, A National, 1. 47 Pearson, ‘Private libraries’, 202.

261 This followed Britain’s introduction in 1850 of the Act that allowed for rate-payer libraries to be set up in towns with the consent of local taxpayers. Behind this legislation lay appreciation of the importance of an informed citizenry in a democracy. The library was seen as a mechanism for political stability and social improvement. Manchester opened the first free library (as public libraries were first called) under the Act in 1852, with the public library promoter Edward Edwards (1812-1886) as first City Librarian.48 Big cities like Liverpool (1852), Sheffield (1853) and Birmingham (1861) opened free libraries (as public libraries were first called). Melbourne did the same in 1856. Andrew Carnegie, the self-made Scottish born steel magnate who was most influential in the growth of fin-de-siècle libraries, was a missionary for Samuel Smiles’ gospel of self-help. Self-taught beyond an elementary education, Carnegie thought ignorance was the greatest obstacle to human progress. He argued that those who possessed wealth were only trustees of that wealth. He challenged all wealthy individuals to support self-improvement institutions like libraries. When Carnegie sold his industrial interests, he could put his ideas into practice and he gave priority to free public libraries. Self-help underscored his objective and his gifts were made ‘to encourage a community to establish and maintain a library for itself.’49 For Carnegie the best guarantee for permanent interest and pride in a local institution was ‘the sense of ownership, associated with a steadily developing willingness to make further sacrifices on its behalf.’ To qualify for his largesse, communities had to provide a suitable site and promise annual support of 10 percent of the construction grant.50 Far from simply doling out his largesse, Carnegie boasted that rather than build libraries he persuaded the people to found libraries. Carnegie instituted the principle of joint effort and established it globally. Between 1890 and 1919, Carnegie contributed $US45,000,000 to construct 108 academic and 1,679 public library buildings. This

48 Edward Edwards Memoirs of Libraries, including handbook of library economy (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), 1:776; Sturges, ‘Public Library people 1850-1919’, 110; Edward Edwards, Free town libraries: their formation, management and history in Britain, France, Germany and America together with brief notices of book-collectors, and of the respective places of deposit of their surviving collections (London: Trübner & Co., 1869); idem, Libraries and founders. 49 As the Carnegie Corporation outlined his program in 1935: Ralph Munn and Ernest R. Pitt with an introduction by Frank Tate, Australian libraries: a survey of conditions and suggestions for their improvement (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia 1935/1967), 10. 50 Wayne A. Wiegand, ‘Libraries’ in The Oxford Companion to United States History ed. Paul S. Boyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t119.e0899 (accessed January 24, 2010).

262 was his solution to the lack of educational opportunities in the late nineteenth century. As with Coutts and Mitchell, early impressions affected Carnegie’s outlook. He came from a long line of Scottish weavers, some of whom had been involved in the political and labor organizing activities of English radical journalist William Cobbett (1763-1835).51 His formative years were spent in a small community that was struggling to retain control over industrialization. This influence remained with Carnegie for the rest of his life. In New South Wales, the introduction of compulsory education and extensions to schooling that flowered during the second half of the nineteenth century, saw the achievement of near universal literacy. By 1891, just over 90% of New South Wales’ population was able to read and write.52 The gradual increase in leisure time added to the habit of reading. Reading became the norm for literate urban inhabitants. Their call for literature saw free libraries open across the British world – from Scotland to Canada to Australasia.53 Mitchell supported the Library Movement owing to the long history within his family with reading and with respecting educational opportunity. In Sydney, the deficiencies of the Free Library were legion and widely- publicised. When he visited the library in the 1880s Birmingham industrialist and library philanthropist Sir Richard Tangye considered that Sydney ‘neither does itself justice, nor its collection of books, nor the loving care bestowed upon them by the worthy librarian, Mr. R. C. Walker, on the building which it has provided for their accommodation.’54 Tangye feared ‘it will be a long time before they will build a library equal to the offices used by exalted Government officials.’55 Judging by press reports, desires to examine Australia’s literature were disappointed at both of the library’s two branches. Irish-born Daily Telegraph journalist John Tighe Ryan (1865-1922) wrote that Sydney’s Public Library ‘as every reader knows, is the most pitiable case of the how-not-to-do-it principle to be met

51 Hamer, ‘Giving’, 454-5; Nasaw, Carnegie, 6. 52 J. C. Docherty, Selected social statistics of New South Wales, 1861-1976 (Kensington, N.S.W.: History Project Incorporated, 1982), 30 (Table 2.6 Literacy Status Population aged 10 years or more 1861-1901). Literacy of 94.2% was achieved in 1901. 53 Sturges, ‘Public Library People’, 110, 116; Pearson, ‘Private libraries’, 202. The most influential factor in their establishment was lifestyle disposed to library use, more than the size of community. 54 Sir Richard Tangye, One and all, an autobiography of Richard Tangye of the Cornwall Works, Birmingham (London: Partridge, 1889), 163. Tangye is referring to Robert Cooper Walker (1833- 1897), librarian with the Free Public Library, Sydney (1869-1893) and trustee (1893-1897). 55 SMH 4/7/1933; ML PC vol.3, 78

263 with even in the most ultra-democratic country.’56 He criticised the relatively new lending branch (opened in 1877) where ‘the attendants have a disdainful ignorance of books and writers’. Novels formed the bulk of the books read there, yet Ryan described how ‘one of the assistant librarians assured me recently with a haughty air that they received no novels except those recommended by Mr. Gladstone.’57 A culture of freeing information was yet to emerge.58 Appreciation of literary range beyond what librarians considered as ‘good books’ had to be developed. Ryan called the library a waste of time. Not that free libraries elsewhere were generally much different. Libraries were generally slow to develop across Britain, although local authorities were authorized to provide them. This inertia prompted Carnegie to embark on his program that enabled many free libraries to open throughout Britain from the 1890s. Ryan praised the example set to libraries in Australia by Queensland Parliamentary librarian Denis O’Donovan (1836-1911). The parliamentary library catalogue that O’Donovan produced from 1890 was updated every 2 years.59 In Queensland, appointment to the public service was by examination. This was not the case in New South Wales, where the practice of appointment by patronage was not altered until the Public Service Act of 1895 was passed.60 O’Donovan came to his post with a scholarly background, having been professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the Collège des Hautes Études, Paris and lecturer at the University of

56 Argus, February 3, 1893, 3. 57 The problem of selecting material and its accessibility was widespread: Bernadette A. Lear, ‘Were Tom and Huck On-Shelf? Public Libraries, Mark Twain, and the Formation of Accessible Canons, 1869–1910’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 64, no. 2, (2009): 205. Four-time serving British Prime Minister William Gladstone was a notable book collector who owned a personal library of over 30,000 volumes. On Gladstone as a reader see Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 58 This attitude was common worldwide. Helen Horwitz cites reports from Chicago’s Newberry Library where trustees at the time believed they could lead Chicago’s citizens to appreciate the ‘right’ material through exposure to ‘high culture’: Horwitz, Culture, 91. 59 Denis O'Donovan, Analytical and Classified Catalogue of the Library of the Parliament of Queensland, (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1883)(DSM/Q019.1); idem, Author-list of additions to the Parliamentary Library of Queensland 1883-1890 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1890); idem, Analytical and Classified Catalogue of the Library of the Parliament of Queensland (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1899-1900). 60 Maureen Keane, ‘Education for librarianship in colonial Australia’ in Books, Libraries & Readers in Colonial Australia, Papers from the Forum on Australian Colonial Library History held at Monash University 1-2 June, 1984. Edited by Elizabeth Morrison and Michael Talbot. Clayton, Vic.: Graduate School of Librarianship, Monash University 1985), 115.

264 Paris.61 Ryan reflects the growing sophistication and impatience of readers.62 They wanted more than a reading room: We have only such a library as may be seen at a school of arts, the main difference being that it [the Public Library] is on a much larger scale and has cost a vast deal more money…It was never the intention of those who founded and endowed this institution that it should be nothing more than a miscellaneous collection of books, gathered together on no principle of selection known to scholars, without regard to the special wants of the public.63

Ryan launched the Australian Literary and Copyright Association to syndicate press material to the country press and distribute matter among provincial papers at more competitive rates.64 His reliance on the Library shows how important libraries were as a source of information. Hunger for knowledge was found too by Arthur Jose, who in the 1890s was lecturing in various centres outside Sydney providing lecture courses offered by the University of Sydney (in part of the increased accessibility to knowledge).65 An anonymous writer to the Herald reflects the practices that were hindering readers. Like Ryan, he complained that Sydney’s library failed in its mission as an educating measure when dry-as-dust treatises were preferred to modern novels. He resented the fact that literature was being kept from him when there was as much to learn from modern novels or literature by French writers. He was scornful of the

61 John Adams, ‘More than “librarie keepers”’ in Books, Libraries and Readers in Colonial Australia, Papers from the Forum on Australian Colonial Library History held at Monash University, 1-2 June, 1984 eds. Elizabeth Morrison & Michael Talbot (Clayton, VIC.: Monash University Graduate School of Librarianship, 1985), 97. Robert Longhurst, ‘Personalities from the Past: Denis O’Donovan’, Australian Library Journal 24, no.5 (June 1975): 214-216. 62 On the autonomous voluntary consumption of serious literature for self-improvement as an abiding feature of Victorian and Edwardian working-class culture see Black, English Public Library, 191-2. 63 ‘The Free Public Library’, SMH, August 2, 1893, 8. 64 After being a staff member of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Ryan assumed editorship of the Catholic Press in 1897. In 1892 Ryan jointly edited, with poet George Essex Evans, the illustrated Australian annual The Antipodean (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1893-1897) (DSM/042/P409, DSM/059/79D). On the difficulty of finding published work by Australian authors see ‘Australian Poets’, Argus, February 7, 1893, 10. On resistance in Australia to consolidated news by the Reuters international news agency see Peter Putnis, ‘Reuters in Australia: the supply and exchange of news, 1859-1877’, Media History 10, no. 2 (August, 2004): 67-88; Peter Putnis, ‘How the international news agency business model failed, Reuters in Australia 1877-1895’, Media History 12, no. 1 (April, 2006):1-17. 65 Jose was delivering the University Extension lectures: Jose, Nineties, 60-3.

265 delays caused by binding books before they became accessible, having to wait at least six months for the latest information: ‘Six months in these days of rapid movement sees the inauguration of some new mental development, and so our library, instead of being a centre of light and leading, contributes a monument to the effects of red tape and official ignorance.’66 Readers did not want a ‘treasurehouse’, where books were guarded from ‘untrustworthy’ readers. The Victorians believed that all knowledge is everyone’s province.67 With books now being relatively inexpensive readers saw no reason to be kept away from them. Indeed, as Cambridge library historian David McKitterick points out, ‘for many people, newspapers were of much greater interest and daily importance’.68 To counter criticism, about £26,000 was spent on ‘rehabilitating’ the reading room in the reference library on the corner of Bent Street in 1890. Repositioning the reading room from running parallel with Bent Street to being parallel with Macquarie Street was a band-aid approach to a dilapidated building.69 The reference library held what was promoted as one of the most complete collections of Australian literature in existence. In 1893 Australian books numbered about 13,000 volumes.70 This collection was assembled by the Principal Librarian Robert Walker during his twenty- four years at the Library.71 Problematically, access to them was difficult without proper cataloguing and with safeguards taken to protect them ‘as some of these records are eagerly sought after, and command fancy prices’.72 Material in Sydney’s collection was identified by a list of authors compiled by librarian Robert Walker from 1869 (and intended only for temporary use) with later supplements.73 Walker’s lists served when he took charge of the Subscription

66 ‘The Free Public Library’, SMH, July 28, 1893, 6. 67 G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History, 525 quoted by Joseph D. Hendry, A Social History of Branch Library Development (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association, 1974), 18. 68 David McKitterick, ‘Libraries, knowledge and public identity’, 309. 69 ‘The Free Public Library, Opening of another reading room’, SMH, May 1, 1890, 4. 70 Nelson, ‘Anderson’, 28. 71 Under Walker’s watch (1869-93), the library grew from 16,000 volumes to over 100,000 volumes. Biskup, Libraries, 43. 72 ‘The Free Public Library, Opening of another reading room’, SMH, May 1, 1890, 4. 73 R. C. Walker, comp., Works on New South Wales, compiled at the Free Public Library (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1878) (DSM/991/5A1); Free Public Library (Sydney, N.S.W.), Catalogue of the Free Public Library, Sydney, 1876, Reference Department. (Sydney: Government Printer, 1878) (DSM/Q019.1/2); idem, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Free Public Library, Sydney, for the Years 1877 and 1878, Reference Department (Sydney: Government Printer, 1880); Free Public Library (Sydney, N.S.W.) Lending Branch, Catalogue of the Lending Branch of the Free Public

266 Library’s smaller and more static collection of standard titles. This system was far from adequate by the 1890s, with a reading public seeking more diverse titles and increasing varieties of publications. Additional titles were periodically listed so a full catalogue of titles held up to 1888 did not appear until 1893. Still, Walker’s catalogue, Australasian Bibliography in Three Parts, was a standard of its kind for many years.74 It has been suggested that Walker’s development of the Australian collection partly influenced Mitchell to bequeath to the library.75 Walker retired on 31 August 1893 and was appointed a trustee that October. Mitchell followed the choice of his successor with interest. Walker had made it easy to be kept abreast of library matters. He had kept in touch with Mitchell, sought his advice and offered him material that the Library bypassed. As a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out, whenever an official appointment to the library was made ‘the question of qualifications…if considered at all has been subordinate to political influences.’76 Henry Charles Lennox Anderson (1853-1924) succeeded Walker. Known as a teacher, statistician, and an able and public-spirited man, Anderson was appointed chief librarian in September 1893. He came to the Library from a more senior and better paid position as first Director of the somewhat abortive Department of Agriculture (1890-1893) that had been set up to help deal with depressed agricultural prices. An agricultural chemist, Anderson lacked literary attainments, being more familiar with orchard pests and soil types. Yet he came with experience in educational circles, having been the first director of the Agricultural College established at Richmond in 1891.77 He also ran a Penrith orchard, presided over the Horticultural Society of New South Wales, widely presented lectures on agricultural and horticultural subjects, and was

Library, Sydney, for 1880 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881), with a supplement issued in 1883. 74 Biskup, Libraries, 43. 75 G. D. Richardson, ‘Robert Cooper Walker (1833-1897)’, ADB, vol. 6, (1976), 341-2. Also G. D. Richardson, ‘A Man of Zeal and Application’, Australian Library Journal 25, no. 9 (August 1976): 242-3; Free Public Library of New South Wales, Australasian Bibliography (in three parts), Catalogue of Books in the Free Public Library, Sydney, Relating to, or Published in Australasia 1869-1888 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1893)(DSM/Q016.99/1A1); Australasian Bibliography from the ‘Daily Telegraph’ 1893 (Sydney: Daily Telegraph, 1893) (DSM/015.9/D), a notebook of cuttings. 76 ‘The Free Public Library’, SMH, August 2, 1893, 8. 77 Today’s Hawkesbury Agricultural College, of the University of Western Sydney. See, Biskup, Libraries, 44.

267 prominent in the Highland Society.78 Like Walker, Anderson came from a useful mould. His father had been an inspector of the police force; his brother was city treasurer and later town clerk of Sydney. Whereas Walker was unassuming, Anderson was more assertive and accustomed to directing projects under his command. The only blemish in his otherwise successful public service career was a dispute with Thomas Slattery, Secretary for Mines and Agriculture under whose authority Anderson fell.79 Their quarrel (over the growth of Anderson’s department) and the closing of the Agriculture Department account for Anderson’s sideways move into the Library. At the Agriculture Department Anderson headed a larger staff and substantially larger budget than that of the Library.80 Economy was the order of the day with Government income adversely affected by the financial crisis that saw banks collapse during 1892.81 Significantly, the consequences from this would see five changes of government between 1894 and 1904.82 Anderson was answerable to the Minister of Public Instruction. Less than two years into his position, administration of the Government Labour Bureau went from the hands of the Chief Secretary to a newly-created Department of Labour and Industry. This became the responsibility of the Minister of Public Instruction, who also became Minister for Labour and Industry. This would have ramifications for Anderson because responding to industrial unrest, sorting out unemployment, and providing unemployment relief took ministerial precedence over literary affairs. Anderson recognised his challenge. He inherited an organization that had been well served by Walker, but was hampered by inadequate funding and desperately in need of modernizing. The hopes that Walker and Charles Badham had held for a grand library building had come to nothing. Responses to difficulties facing the library’s two branches (a reference library and a lending branch) could only be made

78 Prentis, The Scots in Australia, 231. The Highland Society was one of 10 affiliated Scotch societies which undertook welfare and literary activities. Membership included Professor Mungo MacCallum and William Dymock. 79 ‘Colonial Parliaments’, BC, July 29, 1896, 5. July 28. Thomas Michael Slattery (1844-1920) was secretary for mines and agriculture in Sir George Dibbs's government of 1891-94 before resigning from parliament in 1895. 80 For this reason Anderson was dubbed ‘the reluctant librarian’. 81 SMH, October 4, 1893, 6. 82 For details of changing ministries (1902-1910), the political scene and difficulties of shifting loyalties in the slimmed-down public service from June 1901 see Peter J. Tyler, The Administration of New South Wales, vol. 2, Humble & Obedient Servants, 1901-1960 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 16- 38.

268 in line with the restrained climate of the depressed years of the late nineteenth century. At the same time Anderson would be working when Government was reviewing the public service, and the brooms of reform were slowly sweeping through departments. The reference library was housed in the same building where James Mitchell had overseen it. Its condition was considered dangerous then; it was now crowded out by ever-greater numbers of readers and titles. Congestion in the outdated reference building created difficulties for harried staff in retrieving publications.83 A letter written by James Bray (whom Mitchell knew) to the Sydney Morning Herald suggested it would only be a matter of time before a possibly fatal accident would happen there.84 Their problems were due to more than overcrowding. Fundamental questions of how titles should be classified and catalogued needed to be addressed. Classifying material for easy retrieval was essential in an age urgently hungry for ideas. Cataloguing theory and practice were in their infancy, like much else about public libraries at the time. Anderson discovered that librarianship was a rapidly developing field. A measure of this growth was the formation of the Australasian Library Association, which held its first conference in April 1896.85 Signalling his intention to play a part in this development, he changed the name of the Free Library to the Public Library of New South Wales in 1895.86 The following year, he compiled a Guide to the

83 On Anderson’s disappointment upon his arrival at the library, the grossly inadequate building and his views regarding incompetent staff, see Nelson, ‘H.C. L. Anderson’, 216-19, 224. 84 James S. Bray, ‘Free Public Library’, SMH, February 2, 1895, 4. Bray was a natural history collector and sometime journalist. He opened a private museum in Sydney from where he exhibited and sold items that he collected, including to Mitchell for whom he procured items. See Chanin, Book Life, 183-187. 85 G. W. Cole, Account of the proceedings of the first Australasian library conference held at Melbourne on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th April, 1896: together with the papers read, list of delegates, etc., and the Constitution and office bearers of the Library Association of Australasia. An index to bibliographical papers published by the Bibliographical Society and the Library Association, London: 1877-1932 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1896). The Association did not last beyond 1902. 86 To Anderson the library should be a national library and not a library for Sydney alone: Nelson, ‘Anderson’, 222. Later, on Federation, Anderson lobbied Edmund Barton to establish a copyright act to secure copies of all published Australian books, and to systematically collect Australian material. Mandatory deposit was achieved in 1912. Michael Pearson and Duncan Marshall, National Library of Australia Conservation Management Plan (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2005), 15 online at http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/documents/NLACMPExposureDraftCorrectforAdvertisement6July2007. pdf (accessed September 17, 2011).

269 catalogues of the reference library (1896).87 Running into four editions this assisted America’s Library of Congress in the turn-of-the-century reorganization of its cataloguing and classifications systems.88 He set up a ‘new’ newspaper reading room in the gallery at the Lending Branch in mid-1894. Located in Macquarie Street, this was situated in an old iron building that had formerly been St Stephen’s Church and was unsuitable for conversion to a library. It had been built in sections in Scotland and erected nearly 50 years before. Describing its disrepair and discreditable appearance, the press said it was ‘more like a large oven than a library reading room. During last year the temperature ranged from 42 in the winter to 108 in the summer’.89 In 1895 close to 180,000 readers visited the room; many readers were unable to find a seat. The library’s meagre funds put Australiana beyond its reach.90 The obligation of legal deposit of New South Wales publications under the Copyright Act (1870) was not strictly enforced or observed. By 1898, the library had virtually abandoned efforts to build its collection of Australiana that Walker had assembled.91 Used to encouraging cooperation among fruit-growers, Anderson would have to assiduously cultivate collectors like Mitchell to supply the library with more than the Government provided, particularly Australiana. Inevitably Mitchell and Anderson met each other. Unfortunately, no record exists of their first meeting. Rose Scott is alleged to have introduced them in 1895.92 Both could only have been curious about each other and keen to meet. They would have had much to discuss together given the degree of activity that was then occurring in the world of literature and libraries, apart from frustration over developing Sydney’s library. New practices were expanding both the literary market and libraries. Rising prices were testing the book market that was heating up internationally with unprecedented desire for rare books at the turn of the century.

87 H. C. L. Anderson, comp., Guide to the Catalogues of the Reference Library with Regulations and Guide to the System of Cataloguing (Sydney: Government Printer, 1896). A second edition was issued in 1897. 88 Biskupp, Libraries in Australia, 44. 89 Equivalent to centigrade temperatures of 5 to 42: ‘The Public Library’, SMH, February 19, 1896, 5. 90 McCormick, Turnbull, 163: New Zealand bibliophile A. H. Turnbull was expanding his Australasian collection in size and scope at this time. 91 Jones, ‘Relations’, 21. 92 David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration & Delight, The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826 (Sydney: Library Council of New South Wales, 1988), 39.

270 Price increases were fuelled by spirited bidding by the leading Victorian bookseller Bernard Quaritch at sales and American competition.93 Collecting (as Mitchell knew it) was changing. At the same time the new science of libraries and their management was concentrating minds world-wide on the organization that literature and information management required. A feature of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the novel catalogue of the American Library Association that offered a recommended list of thousands of titles.94 Seventy-five American librarians, many highly respected, assembled this catalogue under Melvil Dewey (1851-1931), creator of the Dewey Decimal System and President of the Association. A copy in the Sydney library could have served as the model for Anderson’s plans to improve Walker’s out- dated 1893 catalogue. Changes were occurring so rapidly that as library collections grew, comprehensive printed catalogs would become unfeasible and by 1910 many libraries would abandon them. Meanwhile, Mitchell studied Anderson’s guide to cataloguing titles, aware of the deficiencies in the Public Library.95 Anderson undoubtedly hoped to impress Mitchell, probably thinking his Scottish ties and association with the University could link them. His academic career had been distinguished (B.A. 1873, M.A. 1878), and in April 1895 he was elected to fill the vacancy in the University Senate caused by the death of Sir William Manning. Anderson toasted graduates and teachers at the forty-fifth annual commemoration in the Town Hall in April 1896 at which Peter Russell’s gift of £50,000 to establish a school of engineering was announced.96 Their relationship was not to develop till later, following Anderson’s return from Europe, where he was sent in late May 1897. Anderson represented Australian libraries at the 2nd International Conference of the Library Association of United Kingdom Libraries, which opened in London on 13 July that year. When abroad over

93 William Y. Fletcher, English Book Collectors (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1902); William I. Fletcher, Public Libraries in America (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1894) (DSM/020/F). 94 U.S. Bureau of Education, Catalog of “A.L.A.” Library: 5000 Volumes for a Popular Library Selected by the American Library Association and Shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), vii–ix. 95 Anderson to Mitchell, November 4, 1897, ML MSS A1416, 116. Three supplements to the catalogue were issued in 1897 (for 1893-5, 1896, 1897). The last two were intended only for temporary use. Anderson was then revising the Guide. The Library’s catalogue of authors consisted of a Main catalogue (1869-87), 1st supplement (1888-93), 2nd supplement (1893-95), 3rd supplement (1896). 96 ‘The Sydney University’, Argus, April 20, 1896, 5; ‘Sydney University’, SMH, April 20, 1896

271 seven months Anderson inspected 70 libraries.97 He described them as ‘the most prominent libraries of England and the European Continent with a view of studying economy in library administration as well as the best method to be adopted in arranging a public library with the twofold object of facilitating the work of the staff, and providing for the comfort and convenience of the reading public.’98 The conference was attended by 600 delegates, 90 from America, including the foremost American authority Charles Ammi Cutter (1837-1903), whose innovations in classification systems influenced the development of the Library of Congress.99 Anderson read a paper on library work in New South Wales. Fellow Australian Edward Petherick explained and exhibited his bibliography of Australia.100 While in Europe Anderson realized how much leadership was needed in Sydney. At the time Andrew Carnegie’s generosity to libraries dominated public library giving.101 In a similar spirit to Carnegie’s, the English publisher John Passmore Edwards (1823–1911) gave to establish fifteen libraries in London and nine in Cornwall and Devon.102 Second only to Andrew Carnegie as Britain’s most famous public library benefactor, Edwards was another self-starter, a carpenter’s son. With the money he made as proprietor of Britain’s first half-penny evening newspaper, the London Echo, he erected 70 buildings, mostly libraries (but also art galleries and museums, hospitals, convalescent homes and orphanages in poor and remote districts). Influenced by utilitarianism, his purpose was to combat the ignorance that beset the working classes by placing books in the way of all Anderson swung into action immediately on his return to Sydney. He enlisted the press for support to his campaign for change. He pointed to the deficient accommodation at the library and hammered home the need for a new building. After

97 Jones, Relations, 41. 98 ‘A Librarian on his travels’, SMH, October 28, 1897, 3. Sturges, ‘Public Library people’, 117. In Europe, Anderson visited libraries in Italy, Switzerland France, England and Scotland; he spent two months studying libraries in the United States: H. C. L. Anderson, ‘Report to Trustees on an inspection of libraries in England, Europe and the US during long service leave in 1903’ in Public Library of New South Wales, Report of the Trustees for 1904. Also, Nelson, ‘H.C.L. Anderson’, 89, 230. 99 Charles A. Cutter and Francis L. Miksa, Charles Ammi Cutter, Library Systematizer (Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1977). 100 ‘International Conference of Librarians’, SMH, July 19, 1897, 5.; ‘Library Conference’ Argus, July 19, 1897, 5; ‘A Librarian on his travels’, SMH, October 28, 1897, 3. 101 Sturges, ‘Public Library people’, 117. Between 1897 and 1913, Carnegie distributed £1,750,000 to 295 libraries. 102 Sturges, ‘Public Library people’, 118; ‘Death of Mr. Passmore Edwards’, Times, April 24, 1911, 11; Kelly, Public Libraries, 495.

272 taking a Herald reporter through the library, the paper reported that ‘space available is too small, the arrangement of the building is bad, and the ventilation is unsatisfactory’.103 Reading was anything but a pleasure in the Public Library. Mitchell intended to make a gift of his collection. He discussed his intentions with George Robertson, who passed on news of Mitchell’s plan to New Zealand collector, Dunedin doctor, Thomas Morland Hocken (1836-1910). Dunedin was not yet twenty years old when Lincolnshire-born Hocken settled there in 1862 and he played his part in shaping the city’s vision of itself as the ‘Edinburgh of the South’. He helped to establish a branch of the Linnean Society and the Otago Branch of the Philosophical Institute (New Zealand’s equivalent of the Royal Society). Keenly interested in New Zealand’s history, he collected literature and items that recorded the changes that were occurring around him. From 1879 he traveled across the country several times collecting artifacts and information about Maori customs. In 1898 Hocken asked Mitchell for advice as to what he might do with his own collection. Hocken relayed his disappointment over plans for giving his library to Dunedin. He wrote:

When making my offer to the public I said that it was dependent on their housing and making provision for the due care of my collection. But so far I have been much disappointed, as with the exception of a little stir and few laudatory letters at first, nothing effective has been done. I thus begin to feel not only somewhat chagrined but also inclined to withdraw from my position, and to leave my library in the safekeeping of some trustee until in the fullness of time proper provision is made.104 Hocken’s experience was a warning to Mitchell. He had seen the difficulties experienced at the Australian Museum, and with the protracted development of an art

103 SMH, 5 November, 1897, 3. 104 Hocken to Mitchell, March 28, 1898. ML A1461, 130-131. George Robertson told Hocken of Mitchell’s intentions, when visiting Dunedin. Robertson enlisted Hocken’s help in supplying Mitchell with printed material. For Robertson, Hocken was assembling a collection of newspapers ranging from the early 1840s to the 1860s which he thought was for Mitchell. Hocken contemplated following Mitchell’s lead and presenting his library to the public of New Zealand. Hocken hoped to meet Mitchell to exchange thoughts. They exchanged material, however (as of late 2010) no evidence has come to light that shows that they met.

273 gallery for the city, besides over the erection of the Macleay Museum at the University.105 Early in 1898, Anderson engaged Mitchell in plans for the forthcoming meeting of the newly established New South Wales branch of the Australasian Library Association scheduled for later that year in Sydney.106 Association branches were already formed in Victoria and South Australia, and in New South Wales several libraries were marshalling a branch. Mitchell was appointed to their local committee responsible for making all necessary arrangements for the October meeting. Mitchell knew about these plans because Alfred Lee, Arthur Jose and other acquaintances were on the committee. The assembly was anticipated with special keenness as it would be opened by an exhibition drawn from leading colonial collections. Rarely seen books, old maps, engravings and manuscripts and other articles of historic and bibliographical interest would be exhibited in a Conversazione to be held at the Great Hall of the University on October 4th. In July Anderson sent Mitchell the 1898 guide he had compiled to the Public Library’s reference library.107 In September, Anderson circulated appeals soliciting objects for the coming exhibition. He was particularly after items of Australian historic interest (such as relics of Captain Cook and the early Governors and colonists) and he sought these from collectors. A month before, in late August, James Hogue (1846-1920) was appointed Minister of Public Instruction. Most likely Mitchell knew Hogue; they certainly would have known of each other (and met that year, if not before). Just ten years younger, Hogue was born in the Hunter Region. First educated in Newcastle, Hogue was an alumni of the University, had been a keen cricketer, was widely read and was known for his connections in the colony. He worked first with the Newcastle Chronicle, joined the Maitland Mercury as a reporter in 1873, and became a parliamentary reporter in Sydney in 1875. A Liberal and reformist, he entered the

105 Susan Clarke, ‘The Macleay Museum Building’ in Stanbury & Holland, Mr Macleay’s celebrated cabinet, 59-73. William Macleay left his collection to the University on condition that a building be erected to house it. The Macleay Museum opened in 1890 after the New South Wales House of Assembly voted £10,000 for its erection in late 1884. 106 March 17, 1898. ML MSS A1461/127; Anderson attended the Intercolonial Library Conference where the Association was formed in 1896 at Melbourne. ‘Intercolonial Library Conference’, Argus, April 27, 1896, 6. 107 H. C. L. Anderson (Comp.), Guide to the System of Cataloguing of the Reference Library, with Regulations for Visitors, Hints to Readers and Students, Rules for Cataloguing and Subject Headings Used in the Dictionary Index 3rd edition (Sydney: Government Printer, Sydney, 1898) (DSM/Q025.3/6C1). A fourth edition was issued in 1902.

274 Legislative Assembly in mid-1894 and quickly rose to ministerial position. Would Hogue’s appointment offer a window of opportunity for Mitchell, keen to tidy his arrangements, and Anderson, keen to make his mark? The problem for Mitchell was that he needed the Library Trustees to be a statutory body (that would enable them to receive his gift), and as yet there was no exemption from stamp duty on bequests. Mitchell sent in his exhibits for the Library Association exhibition. Anderson asked Mitchell to exhibit the first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads (1892) that interested Anderson but Mitchell did not oblige.108 Assembling the exhibition, Anderson lacked funds to print a catalogue but compiled a checklist from lists and notes supplied by the exhibitors.109 It usefully reveals collecting trends. The bulk of the exhibition of over 600 items came from the Public Library which lent over 350 items. A marked English bias was evident including in the exhibits that came from Sydney’s newly opened Art Gallery. The focus on English material was, in itself, not unusual for the time. An increasing interest in English literature, and in contemporary or near-contemporary authors, was one of the major developments in book-collecting tastes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.110 In all, 26 private collectors besides Mitchell provided items from their collections. Among them were Alfred Lee, Rose Scott, the Hon. Philip Gidley King, and Professor Mungo McCallum (1854-1952), appointed the University’s Foundation Professor of Modern Languages and Literature in 1886 and later Vice-Chancellor. They largely lent Australiana which was desirable. Looming Federation had heated interest in patrimonial material such that collectors were finding ‘only a dribble of the flow’ coming their way.111 Anderson’s checklist also demonstrates Mitchell’s prominence. He heads the list of exhibiting collectors before the Trustees of the Public Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. All the twenty-one items that Mitchell exhibited stressed British heritage, as if to demonstrate that there was more than local interest to his collection. He exhibited

108 Mitchell’s views on Kipling may be read from his ownership of only Kipling’s Departmental ditties and other verses: Rudyard Kipling, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1886) (DSM/Z/C681); Rudyard Kipling, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses 3rd ed.(Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co, 1886) (DSM/821.89/K57/3C1). Arthur Jose pointed to Edward Morris’s dislike of Kipling: Jose, Nineties, 39. 109 Henry C. L. Anderson, Guide to the Loan Exhibition of Old and Rare Books, Manuscripts, Engravings, and Historical Relics Held in the Great Hall, Sydney University, October 4th, 1898 (Sydney: Hennessey, Campbell & Co., 1898)(DSM/ 020.6/L). 110 Pearson, Books as history, 188. 111 So New Zealand bibliophile Alexander Turnbull found: McCormick, Turnbull, 227.

275 illustrated works by William Henry Pyne (1770-1843), Henry Shaw (1800-1873), Robert Ronald McIan (c.1803–1856), John Obadiah Westwood (1805–1893), and views of the tower in Bath built by collector William Beckford (1760–1844). Pyne's (1770-1843) three-volume History of the Royal Residences (1819) was one of the most sumptuous publications in hand-coloured aquatint. London-born antiquary and illuminator Henry Shaw was a precocious architectural draughtsman, who illustrated numerous de luxe publications that were praised by antiquarian enthusiasts. Scottish- born actor and illustrator Robert McIan was a renowned colourist and early painter of scenes from highland history. Entomologist and palaeographer, John Westwood was devoted to antiquarian pursuits and an unsurpassed authority on Anglo-Saxon and medieval manuscripts. Mitchell exhibited Westwood’s antiquarian work Palaeographia sacra pictoria (1843–5). Mitchell’s selection illustrated the fact that antiquarian and historical detail came from more than the written document, and could equally be gained from visual sources. At the Conference over 220 Library Association members heard Anderson speak on State subsidies and private benefactions to libraries.112 He considered that by 1898, taking into account Australia’s population, more money had been spent on public libraries than in older countries. He counted 417 libraries in New South Wales which housed over a million volumes. Over £400,000 had gone to buildings for them, half of which he assumed was provided by the State. Country libraries had been subsidized for the past twenty years and the government paid £5,000 each year to them. There were 55 municipal libraries, which housed over 350,000 volumes of which less than half were fiction. Anderson stressed that a country worthy of national existence must have a National Library ‘whose primary object will be to act as a store house for the nation’s literature in the widest and most general sense.’113 He lamented that Australia had not yet distinguished itself in private benefactions. Most of Anderson’s speech described notable benefactors to public libraries in the United States ‘in the hopes that some of our wealthy Australians may perchance be moved to go and do likewise’. As

112 Library Association of Australasia, Proceedings of the Sydney meeting, October, 1898, with Three Appendices (Sydney: Hennessey, Harper & Co, 1899) (DSM/ 020.6/ L); ‘Library Association Australasia’, SMH, October 7, 1898, 3; The University conversazione was attended by about 500 visitors, and considered a success: Nelson, ‘H. C. L. Anderson’, 26. 113 ‘Library Association Australasia’, SMH, October 7. 1898, 3.

276 exemplars in Australia, he singled out Thomas Fisher for his bequest to the University for a library, and Sir Richard Tangye for his gift to the Public Library of a First Folio Shakespeare. He said that in Great Britain during the last nine years donations to the value of £1.2 million had been presented to public libraries and private endowments to public libraries in the United States in the last 30 years amounted to £6 million. Hogue was present during part of the proceedings. He told the delegates that there could be no more important trend than the Public Library Movement and cooperation in connection with public and private libraries. He promised he would assist them as far as he could and it would give him greatest pleasure to be of service to them. As it happened, while arrangements were being made for the conference, the Library and Art Gallery Act was passed in 1899.114 This constituted the Library Trustees as a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal. The Act allowed exemption from stamp duty on donations or bequests of any kind, anticipating that the library should benefit from testamentary benefactions of public- spirited citizens. This gave Mitchell what he had been waiting for.115 That October Hogue was scheduled to meet the Public Library Trustees to discuss the urgent question of the Library’s congestion and its future growth. On the strength of the Library Association Conference, Anderson believed that Hogue might provide vital support. On 15 October 1898, Anderson asked Mitchell for ‘your advice as to certain arguments I wish to bring before him [Hogue].’116 Anderson, who had his Minister’s ear, told Mitchell that Hogue seemed sympathetic to the Library, which made him ‘unique among Minsters past and present.’ Two days later, on 17 October, 1898, Mitchell communicated his intention through Anderson to bequeath his collection to the Public Library of New South

114 New South Wales Library and Art Gallery Act. An Act to incorporate the trustees of the Public Library and National Art Gallery respectively to provide for the endowment and management of those institutions (Sydney: Government Printer, 1900); Bladen, Historical Notes, 71. 115 Fletcher, Australian History in New South Wales, 60. Fletcher considers that Mitchell triggered the passage of the Act and that the deep responsibility taken by the trustees in his collections justified Mitchell’s vesting them in the trustees rather than the Government. Also, Nelson, ‘H.C.L. Anderson’, 106. Nelson considers that James Norton was central to explaining to Hogue the need to incorporate the library Trustees so as to manage Mitchell’s intended endowment. Mitchell intended that the Trustees would purchase further items for the library after his death. The Trustees became the Council of the Library of New South Wales when the Library’s name was changed again in 1969 to the State Library of New South Wales. 116 Anderson to Mitchell, October 15, 1898, ML MSS A1461, 5.

277 Wales on certain conditions.117 It is worth quoting Anderson’s announcement at length because it allows us to clearly hear the rare example of Mitchell’s voice. Anderson announced that Mitchell told him,

I have here 30,000 volumes, prints, engravings and pictures the Australasian portion of which I have collected as the main object of my life, to enable future historians to write the history of Australia in general, and New South Wales in particular; and I wish this whole collection to be kept together in Sydney, the city of my birth, and to be known as the Mitchell Library. The present value is hard to estimate, probably the amount spent on it would be approximately £30,000. I am adding to it to the extent of £800 a year, and hope to continue to do so. I am anxious to bequeath the whole of it to the Public Library, so that it may be available for those who desire to use it in future years, provided that the Government will take steps to assure me of their intention to provide suitable accommodation for keeping it separate as the ‘Mitchell Collection’, and for making it freely available to students. I do not wish to interfere in the plans of a new Library, nor to dictate terms in any way, but shall be satisfied with an assurance that the Government intend to proceed with the erection of a suitable National Library, and to provide inside it the necessary accommodation for my present 30,000 volumes and the future increments to it. I am anxious to have some assurance of future action, so that I may make due provision in my Will at once. This is a matter that, doubtless, concerns others besides myself, because there are other gentlemen making special collections in different branches of human knowledge, who would like to feel that their labours should benefit others in due time, and should not be dispersed by the auctioneer’s hammer. It is obviously impossible for the Library in its present crowded state, to make adequate provision for even small bequests, not to speak of large and valuable collections. Hence our natural anxiety as to the plans of the Government on Library matters.’

Mitchell’s statement is a masterpiece of concision and diplomacy. He begins by quantifying his offer, making clear the prize that he is offering. He focuses on the Australian content of his collection, knowing that this is of greatest local interest. He

117 ML 1461, 143, 7-8; Flotsam & Jetsam, Vol.5, 165.

278 qualifies its importance and rarity, giving the reminder that it took his lifetime to assemble. He also qualifies its purpose: his life’s work has been directed to capturing historical evidence for future historians of Australia and particularly of New South Wales. Making his intention clear, he next estimates its worth in monetary terms to confirm its significance. By stressing that his commitment remains ongoing, he invests his offer with still more appeal. With the prize clearly defined, he announces his desire to give all of it to Sydney’s Public Library. This is when he stipulates his requirements. First, he requires Government assurance that his substantial collection will be suitably accommodated, and kept separate in a dedicated library bearing his name. Secondly, his collection must be freely available for research. Both requirements could only be achieved by a new building for the library. He flags this, and emphasises the importance of his offer by turning attention to the Government’s need to erect a National Library. He will legally confirm his gift immediately Government confirms its undertaking to erect a new library building. He warns of the cost of inaction when he puts to Government that the State might gain further benefit from others like himself, who were currently inhibited from giving to the State and thus squarely lobs his offer into the State’s court, making it impossible to refuse. No mention was made that the library should be incorporated by Act of Parliament.118 No doubt intending to sweeten the gift for the Government, Anderson stressed that the collection was worth much more than Mitchell’s assessment. The higher estimation came from Edward Morris. A trustee of the Melbourne Public Library, Morris promoted the Australasian Library Foundation, and called on Mitchell while attending the Association meeting in Sydney. Anderson said that Morris valued Mitchell’s library at £100,000. Mitchell’s usefulness was more important to Anderson than the collection’s rarity. Anderson wanted to make it clear that he had snared a valuable gift. Anderson continued,

…the present value of this unique collection is not to be measured by its cost to the owner, for many of its treasures are priceless now, such as original Journals and Logs of the early explorers and navigators, Manuscripts of our Australian writers, Autographs, original Engravings and Sketches, and similar

118 ‘Mitchell Library, How it was Founded’, SMH, July 26, 1922, 13.

279 rarities in which our Library is deficient owing to the inability of the Trustees to pay the prices demanded. At present we have to regard Mr. Mitchell as our greatest rival in the market for old Australian books, if his noble offer be accepted, he will be our greatest ally.119

He implied that more generosity may come from Mitchell. The government responded quickly. Within a fortnight, Hogue indicated that it would soon be possible to decide on a site for a new building for the Public Library. He could do little else, as news of Mitchell’s intention broke in the Press two days before Hogue responded officially to Mitchell’s offer (and much to Anderson’s surprise). Press reports of Mitchell’s announcement went Australia-wide, recounting that the value of the bequest was £100,000, and that assembling his collection was ‘the hobby of Mr Mitchell’s life.’120 William Astley was among the first to offer Mitchell his admiration and appreciation of the ‘noble, public spirited action’ he read of in the daily papers that morning of 29 October. He wrote portentously that the magnificent character of Mitchell’s gift could only be faintly understood: ‘Only the few who know something of the past can now comprehend all that is involved in it. But future generations of the people will realise their debt to you.’121 Another early letter to arrive came from the journalist and social observer John Plummer, whose writing forty years earlier on worker co-operatives had been admired by Edward Wise’s brother and whom Mitchell had met frequently including at Angus & Robertson’s.122 Plummer complimented Mitchell on the excellent example his gift gave, which ‘will form an enduring monument of your taste and judgement.’123 Plummer himself for nearly fifty years had squirreled away items of interest to them both, many from the English Stage. He counted among his friends English architect and antiquarian Sir William Tite (1798-1873), whose collection of old books was one of the greatest of the mid-nineteenth century; the author and pioneer

119 Anderson, October 17, 1898, ML 1461 143, 7-8. 120 WA, November 1, 1898, 6. 121 Astley to Mitchell, October 29, 1898, ML MSS A1461, 143. 122 As a result, Plummer was retained by John Fairfax as English social affairs correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1867. See Ken Stewart, ‘Plummer, John (1831 - 1914)’ in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 11:248-249. 123 Plummer to Mitchell, October 31, 1898, ML MSS A1461, 148.

280 publisher John Camdem Hotten (1832-1873), who first published novels in paperback editions; and John Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl Spencer, whose Althorpe Library (and for which Dibdin was librarian) was acknowledged to be the finest library in private ownership.124 Ranking Mitchell alongside these illustrious bibliophiles allowed Plummer to convey to Mitchell the pleasure he gave to Plummer ‘in finding in Sydney one like yourself who can make a better use of his means and opportunities than do the majority of his wealthy fellow colonists who take a delight in accumulating fortunes which in too many cases are squandered by those inheriting them.’125 Mitchell’s first written communication concerning his gift reached Hogue five days after Mitchell received Hogue’s acceptance of his offer.126 Satisfied that the Cabinet was willing to accede to his wishes as to housing and keeping his collection intact, Mitchell replied to Hogue that he hoped that a site for the Public Library’s new building would be decided on soon. Taking the Government’s acceptance of his terms as a given, Mitchell at once confirmed his benefaction by giving the library Trustees his first donation of books. He handed over 10,024 volumes with fifty pictures and engravings as a first instalment of his collection. They were thought, he said, to be worth ‘fully £6,000.’127 This lot from Mitchell’s collection became known as his ‘main gift’. The rest would follow when accommodation was provided.

7.3 Museum and Library Movement The Trustees recorded their thanks for Mitchell’s ‘munificent gift and generous intentions for the future, their high appreciation of the very great importance of this splendid gift to the people of New South Wales’.128 They told him what he

124 The Spencer collection was mostly assembled at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century by George John (1758-1834), 2nd Earl Spencer, and in turn by John Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl Spencer (1782-1845). Althorp library was inherited from Charles Spencer (1675-1722), 3rd Earl of Sunderland. The statesman, agriculturalist and sportsman John Charles Spencer (Viscount Althorp and 3rd Earl Spencer) developed the library into the finest private library in Europe. Part of the collection is now in the John Ryland University Library of Manchester. 125 Plummer to Mitchell, October 31, 1898, ML MSS A1461, 148. 126 Mitchell to J. A. Hogue, November 3, 1898, ML MSS A1461. 127 The books he gave in this first donation are not listed. Public Library of New south Wales Report of Trustees for the Year 1899, Legislative Assembly, NSW, Tabled 14 March 1900, Item 7, 2. 128 Public Library of New South Wales, Public Library of New South Wales Report of Trustees for the year 1899, Legislative Assembly, NSW, Tabled 14 March 1900, Item 17, 5; J. C. Maynard to Mitchell, February 6, 1899, ML1461, 177.

281 knew, that his books supplemented the Public Library’s collection and would be of inestimable value to future students of literature, history, language, and fine arts. They noted his public-spirited generosity (‘being unprecedented in Australia’) would probably stimulate other Australians to follow the example he set (‘to the enrichment of our Public Libraries, and a marked increase of the appreciation in which the Colony is already held by lovers of literature’). They described Mitchell’s collection as unequalled. His generosity and provision for the Library’s future maintenance and growth would see it ‘necessarily become pre-eminently the greatest Library in Australia’. It would ensure its place ‘as one of the remarkable national collections of the world’. Mitchell’s generosity was unmatched in terms of how his ‘main gift’ developed the library. As the Library’s report tabled for the year 1898-9 makes clear, of the total of just over 100,000 items in its reference department by the end of December 1899, just over 10,000 came from Mitchell. His initial gift expanded the reference Library’s collection by ten per cent. Mitchell intended to keep his collection in an intact body as he knew it.129 Consequently, the material which he handed over was stored in the residence attached to the Public Library, the intention being that their cataloguing would begin immediately.130 This kept Mitchell’s books entirely separate, as he had stipulated. Confusion has always existed over what Mitchell’s collection contained because library records were not kept as they would be today. The initial lists of books that Mitchell first handed over from 1898 have not been traced; nor has the donation register from that time.131 Subsequent to his ‘main gift’ of 1898, he gave many separate gifts to the library in the years before he died.132 Bertram Stevens believed that Mitchell had 40,000 printed books of which 10,000 were handed over to the State Government before Mitchell died.133 News of Mitchell’s intention excited public interest and the Press. Anderson and his staff coped with the extra work load that Mitchell’s gift brought to the library.

129 David Scott Mitchell to Dr. T. M. Hocken, April 8, 1899, Flotsam and Jetsam, Vol.5 No. 165. 130 J. C. Maynard to Mitchell, February 6, 1899, ML1461, 177. 131 Rough lists of donations from Mr Mitchell subsequent to main gift in 1898, MLA/231 (2); F. M. Rutherford, October 15, 1907, ML 90 1907, 475. Rutherford was a temporary hand employed to help classify and arrange the books for six months. She noted it was impossible to verify how many separate gifts Mitchell made from 1898. 132 Chanin, Book Life, 296-7. 133 Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 585.

282 Government inertia took over following Hogue’s departure from office within a year of Mitchell’s announcement. Now a public benefactor, Mitchell gained an idea of what his gift might entail from letters he received offering him expert help. The former librarian to the Bremerhaven collectors the shipbuilder Rickmer Clasen Rickmers (1807-1886), and his son the Central Asian explorer Willi Rickmer Rickmers (1873-1965), offered his service as librarian.134 Mitchell heard too from (now Lady) Mary Windeyer about her fifth daughter Margaret Windeyer (1866-1939). She was a thirty-three year old librarian, who had recently finished training at Melville Dewey’s library school at the New York State Library. Highly regarded by Dewey, she was the first Australian to gain an overseas library qualification and was gaining American experience.135 Intent on librarianship for her profession, her gender had barred her from gaining employment at Sydney’s library ahead of her American training. She would only succeed in gaining appointment in Sydney in 1901 once special library entrance examinations were introduced by the Public Service Board. Whimsically, Mitchell thought it would be curious if Windeyer’s daughter ‘should find her work among my books’, it being ‘now more than fifty-four years since I first knew her father.’136 Windeyer had died unexpectedly in 1897. Mitchell chose to engage Anderson’s expansionist ambition. He handed over to Anderson the task of correspondence in connection with buying fresh books abroad, largely in London. For the next six years Anderson worked as agent for Mitchell. Mitchell’s orders went directly through Anderson, who began toeing a delicate path serving two masters, buying items for Mitchell (a private collector) as well as for the Public Library (the State). Anderson justified his activities on the basis

134 Wolfgang Schaumburg to Mitchell, October 31, 1898, ML MSS A1461, 146-7; On Rickmers see Dr. G. Seligman, ‘Willi Rickmer Rickmers 1873-1965 Obituary.’, The Geographical Journal 131, no.4 (December 1965): 580-581. In 1901, Rickmers gave to the German Alpine Society a core library of 5000 books on exploration. 135 Margaret Windeyer worked with Rose Scott: see, Nelson, ‘H. C. L. Anderson’, 206-208. 136 Mitchell to Lady Windeyer, October 19, 1899, ML MSS A1461, 197a; Margaret Windeyer to Public Library, February 1, 1901 PLNSW A/231(2), 116. Windeyer applied for a position as cataloguer or classifier from America after completing two years at the New York State Library School in 1899. She worked in the catalogue department of the Boston Public Library, and was Librarian in Wells College, Aurora, New York. She had experience with the Dewey or Decimal system having made catalogues for a High School Library and a Free Library. Margaret Windeyer, China and the Far East, 1889-99, contribution toward a bibliography submitted for graduation (New York: New York State Library Bulletin, 1901). She was appointed to the Public Library of New South Wales as a cataloguer in 1901, and remained with the library until 1926. Heather Radi, ‘Windeyer, Margaret (1866-1939)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 12:537-539.

283 of the cost-savings which he negotiated, obtaining discounts of up to 15% on his purchases. He said that these benefitted Mitchell and therefore ultimately the State (by enabling more items to be bought with the funds saved from the discounts he obtained). In late October 1899 as the first New South Wales contingent for the Boer War marched through Sydney’s streets before boarding ship, Mitchell and Anderson embarked on what would become an increasingly testy association. Having his orders go directly through Anderson relieved Mitchell of the administrative load he had carried so far. It spared him from the correspondence that Anderson now had to undertake. A set of folders containing correspondence from booksellers, agents and suppliers across Europe and Britain show how onerous this had become.137 Mitchell picked out the titles he needed from bookseller’s catalogues sent from Britain and Europe and sent the orders through the mail week by week. He bought from early printed books and illustrated books specialist Ludwig Rosenthal and the famous publisher and bibliographer Wouter Nijhoff (1866-1947), both in The Hague. In Paris he bought from second-hand booksellers E. Dufossé, a specialist in early colonial material (from whom Hocken bought); and from Charles Chadenat, the great Parisian antiquarian, who supplied the Houghton Library of Harvard College with its collection of manuscripts on French Canada. As well he bought from Leipzig antiquarian and second hand bookseller Karl W. Hiersemann, who offered material on Fine Arts, Architecture, Orientalia and Cartography and Stuttgart publisher Strecker & Schroder. In England he bought from Bernard Quaritch. He also bought from Quaritch’s only rival for nearly a quarter of a century, Frederick S. Ellis (1830- 1901) and his nephew Gilbert Ellis in New Bond Street.138 He bought from Bertram Dobell (1842-1914), the celebrated London antiquarian, poet, and discoverer of manuscripts of forgotten writers. He bought too from Marylebone bookseller Francis Edwards (whose Australiana catalogues were prepared by Edward Petherick). He bought from the Bath bookbinder Cedric Chivers and provincial booksellers from

137 Order book for items ordered on behalf of David Scott Mitchell, ML191. This order book for items ordered on behalf of David Scott Mitchell (giving the date of the order and bookseller, price, and miscellaneous details) dates from 5 October 1901. No previous order book could be traced. 138 Elisabeth Angermair et al, Die Rosenthals, Der Aufstieg einer judischen Antiquasfamili zu Weltruhm, (Wien, Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2002); The famous publisher and bibliographer Wouter Nijhoff was father of the widely read Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953). Nijhoff’s family were involved in scholarly publishing from 1683. In 1898, Nijhoff specialised in items of History, Philology, Voyages and Geography.

284 Newcastle-on-Tyne to Bristol.139 He bought from new publishers like The Arthur H. Clark Company, formed in 1902 to publish historical books dealing with the discovery and development of the American West. Orders required confirmation. Prices had to be negotiated. Letters came in daily. Frequently private individuals offered personal papers; answering these called for judgement and tact. Anderson arranged with the Treasury to have Mitchell’s payments made via the Agent-General for New South Wales in London. The Agent General would send Mitchell’s orders made by Anderson to the Public Library, thus guaranteeing the delivery of valuable items (and saving freight and postage costs). In the case of items which Mitchell considered exceptionally significant, Anderson would have the Chief Secretary’s Department cablegram the Agent General in London to secure them.140 In 1898 Mitchell said he spent about £800 annually to add to his collection; subsequently Anderson said Mitchell was willing to buy to the extent of about £2000 a year. Mitchell’s budget made him a significant buyer when the entire operating budget of Sydney’s Public Library between 1898 and 1900 totalled just under £8500. Mitchell’s budget was what the Library spent on printed material and binding alone.141 No wonder that in letters to European suppliers Anderson repeatedly described Mitchell as ‘our greatest Australian Collector, the best buyer in Australia.’142 Anderson recognised that Mitchell was a force to be reckoned with, there being nothing like a dedicated collector, free to focus on the rare item. Anderson circulated notices widely to booksellers abroad soliciting material that referred to Australia in its widest sense. He asked them to ‘place under offer to us any rare Australian books, pamphlets, manuscripts or engravings.’143 Dealers were told that Mitchell ‘devotes his best energies to collecting Australian books or anything whatsoever relating to Australasia, for he wishes to make a great national library for

139 Fred S. Ellis was official buyer for many years for the British Museum, and catalogued Henry Huth’s library with Carew Hazlitt (1880); H. R. Tedder, ‘Ellis, Frederick Startridge (1830–1901)’, rev. Fiona MacCarthy, ODNB (2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3308 (accessed April 26, 2009). 140 Anderson to the Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Department, May 28, 1904, ML1, 790-791. 141 Public Library of New South Wales, Report of Trustees for the year 1899, Legislative Assembly, NSW, Tabled 14 March 1900. Item 7, 2. In 1900 the Library spent £3481 on costs associated with salaries, registry of copyright, international exchanges and travelling libraries and £2330 on books, periodicals, newspapers, binding. 142 Anderson to Quaritch, April 23, 1899; Anderson to Messrs Ellis & Elvey, May 13, 1899, 12; Anderson to F. Muller, January 7, 1902, ZML1, 491. 143 Anderson to Messrs Ellis & Elvey, London, May 13, 1899; Anderson to Quaritch, April 23, 1899.

285 this city.’144 He asked them to alert him to ‘any works of any sort’ which related to Australian achievement. Mitchell was intent on closing the gaps remaining in his collection, and Anderson, wanting to develop the library and particularly its gaps in Australian content, was keen to have material that was otherwise beyond the library’s reach. Their purposes intertwined. This shrewd Scottish pair needed each other: one possessed extensive knowledge of character and books, their value and uses; the other with organizational ability, who was a new breed of career public servant, keen to make his mark. Both set great store on a new library building for Sydney. Anderson visited Mitchell each Friday afternoon, a frequency that might have made for a close rapport. However, according to George Robertson, Mitchell detested Anderson; and Anderson was capable of returning scorn for scorn.145 Little warmth appears to have existed between them; their relationship was purely utilitarian. Purchases that Mitchell made in 1900 included Alexander Agassiz’s Visit to the Great Barrier Reef (1898); volumes of the Liège-born sixteenth century engraver Theodore de Bry (1528-1598) on America and India; and volumes of Leiden-based publisher of maps and atlases Pieter van der Aa (1659-1733).146 This was no doubt to complete a later edition he already owned by Dutch-born naturalist Francois Valentijn (1666-1727) on Dutch exploration near Australia before 1800. As a minister in the employ of the V.O.C., Valentijn was engaged in Dutch exploration around the Indonesian archipelago from 1724-26. These purchases show Mitchell’s continued interest in travel, history, and natural history. Mitchell and Anderson began working together one month after the Government of (soon to be Sir) William Lyne took office in September 1899. Replacing Hogue as Minister of Public Instruction was John Perry (1845-1922). Sydney-born, a bank-clerk’s son, Perry had pioneered the Richmond River district. An Alstonville cane farmer and storekeeper, he had been in the Legislative Assembly since early 1889. He chaired the Public Works Committee before becoming the Minister for Public Instruction and Labour and Industry in Lyne’s Cabinet. When the

144 July 14, 1900, Anderson to Karl W. Hiersemann, Leipzig, ML ZML1, 197; For Hiersemann see Burlington Magazine 9, no. 39 (June 1906): 201-2. 145 Robertson to Ifould, August 28, 1925, Angus & Robertson Correspondence 1884-1932, ML MSS 314/60, 318. 146 Provincial booksellers included Wm. George’s Sons in Bristol, opened in Bristol by the son of a shoemaker who ran a circulating library in the 1840s, and took part in the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition.

286 See Ministry came into power in March 1901, Perry continued in the office for over four years until June 1904 acting for part of the time as Colonial Secretary. He subsequently accepted that portfolio and remained Colonial Secretary until the defeat of the Waddell Ministry in August 1904. Focused on educational reform, he was more concerned with schools than the library. His path crossed that of Hogue’s: with the Carruthers Ministry that followed, James Hogue became Colonial Secretary. Through these changes of government – over the six years following Hogue’s reply to Mitchell in October 1898 that Cabinet would honour his requirement regarding a library building – Anderson and Mitchell believed this was in train. Time was running against Mitchell. He needed a building designated for his library to ensure that it would be kept intact, as well to secure the proper library that he believed that Sydney should have. Pressure was mounting too on Anderson who did not want to see New South Wales fall behind library developments occurring elsewhere in the colonies. If New South Wales was ever to establish a ‘national’ library, this hinged on a building both to house Mitchell’s collection and to allow for future growth. The State would not get Mitchell’s collection without a building, nor could Anderson develop the Public Library without one. The collector and the librarian shared goals even if they read these differently. Their goals depended on a building that for seven years simply remained a promise. The difficulties that Anderson faced compounded. Magazines and journals from Australia’s learned societies were superseding pamphlets; without indexing these, articles were lost in the maze of the increasing volume of literature. Calling for volunteers to help with indexing this literature, librarian Hugh Wright (1868-1992) drew agreement at the Sydney meeting of the Library Association, when he noted that fewer people have less time for reading than librarians. The cataloguing system was too narrow and antiquated to be of any real service to anyone. Popular books like Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1890/5) remained uncatalogued (and neither could a copy be found in the library).147 The Library was always behind in cataloguing

147 Paterson’s title was the first locally published Australian bestseller, with 10,000 copies sold in its first year. Webby, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, 55. Hiersemann to Mitchell, March 12, 1900, ML A/231 (2). He bought 10 volumes from the 28-volume set of description of voyages and travels to the East and West Indies by Pieter van der Aa, Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste zee en land-reysen na Oost en West-Indiën (Leiden: Pieter vander Aa, 1707) (C502- 2).

287 owing to one cataloguer doing all the cataloguing.148 It was difficult to get expert cataloguers; with little prospect of promotion, staff turnover was high. Anderson thought young men were unsuited for Library work, yet female employment was still uncustomary.149 During the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in early 1900 every book lent from the Lending Branch was fumigated when returned.150 A thousand books had to be withdrawn from circulation; they were damaged through overuse and needed rebinding. Newspapers were irreparably damaged from overuse. Despite the immense labour entailed in reclassifying, rearranging and re- cataloguing the collection, Anderson recommended this be done according to the Dewey Decimal System of classification (recently adopted by the International Congress of Librarians at Brussels in 1898).151 In 1901 it was gradually being introduced into some of the largest libraries in Great Britain; the difficulty it posed was the labour entailed in reclassifying, rearranging, and re-cataloguing the large number of books. Meanwhile, underway nearby was the first purpose-built accommodation for the New South Wales Parliamentary Library, which would open in 1906. In August 1900 a Legislative Assembly Select Committee was appointed to inquire into the working of the Public Library and investigate alleged maladministration by the Library and its trustees. This was triggered by dissatisfaction among Sydney booksellers with Anderson. In part their complaints sound like commercial grievances led by William Dymock, who said that previously (under Walker) all booksellers had the opportunity to compete for supplying books to the Library, which was not the case under Anderson. Anderson became embroiled in a running battle with Dymock, who resented what he saw as Anderson’s favouring of his competitor, Angus & Robertson. Dymock also believed that the library authorities could do better by buying from the London publishers than from local agents. Presiding over the enquiry was John Fitzpatrick (1862-1932). Fitzpatrick had been

148 Edgar J Godfrey to the Public Librarian, January 23, 1900, ML A/231 (2), 16; Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1890) could not be found listed in any of the catalogues. A. B. Paterson, The Man from Snowy River, and Other Verses 2nd ed. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1895) (DSMA821/P296/1C1). 149 J. R. G. Adams to Anderson, January 31, 1901, PLNSW A/231 (2) 55. 150 J. R. G. Adams to Anderson, January 31, 1901, PLNSW A/231 (2) 55. Cadets joined the staff at £30 annual salary, increased annually by £5 until capped at £50. Anderson found that few male cadets remained longer than 2 years. 151 Anderson was an early adopter of the Dewey Decimal Classification, introduced into Australia by the Public Library of Queensland in the late 1890s. Biskup, Libraries, 44.

288 narrowly voted into the Legislative Assembly in 1895. A policeman’s son, he had been apprenticed to a printer before establishing the Windsor and Richmond Gazette. A free-trader, he was founder of the Provincial Press Association in 1890. He took interest in the history of pioneering days and Dymock published his articles.152 With him on the committee sat James Hogue. The Select Committee inquiry was called over the de-accessioning in 1897 of over 5,000 duplicates to Angus & Robertson. These included titles from Edward Wise’s collection. Dymock, as member of a Citizens’ Reform Committee and described as progressive in his views, had little time for what he viewed as mismanagement at the Library. He was against de-accessioning books by selling them, arguing that releasing volumes bearing the library stamp militated against the security of those in the Library particularly when early Australian books were always increasing in value. He advocated sending surplus books to country libraries instead. Clearly, Dymock thought little of Anderson’s judgement. He also competed with the library for rare stock as the example of George Bennett’s collection shows. Over many years Bennett had built up his reference library that was especially rich in sumptuously illustrated monographs. Second-band booksellers had standing orders to submit to Bennett any work of importance which came into their possession. Library authorities had offered Bennett’s widow £850 for the collection. Dymock bought it for £1000.153 The Select Committee of the New South Wales Parliament, appointed to investigate Anderson’s administration of the Public Library, conducted between late August and December, became heated for Anderson. His agency for Mitchell could prove awkward if put under the spotlight.154 Dymock’s dispute became acrimonious; Anderson alleged that Dymock physically threatened him – a charge which Dymock denied. Whatever their disagreement, this was overtaken by Dymock’s sudden death, just two months into the enquiry into the library. At the time, future bookseller and publisher James Tyrrell (1875-1961), was working for George Robertson so began

152 Bladen to Anderson, January 12, 1901, PLNSW A/231 (2), 70-71. J. C. L. Fitzpatrick, The Good Old Days: Being a Record of Facts and Reminiscences compiled from the Columns of the “Windsor Richmond Gazette” (Sydney: William Dymock, 1900)(DSM/991.3/F). 153 And paid her immediately in cash: ‘F P L’, SMH, September 14, 1900, 2. 154 For a view of allegations against Anderson see Jones, A Source of Inspiration, 39; On Anderson’s agency for Mitchell as a questionable position for a public servant to occupy, see Ellis, ‘Truth’, 92-3. Ellis estimates that Anderson spent £26,000 on behalf of Mitchell. Also, Nelson, ‘Anderson’,102.

289 delivering books to Mitchell from 1890. Tyrrell believed that Dymock had been the most successful at finding items for Mitchell (next to George Robertson and Fred Wymark).155 The enquiry found there had been a laxity shown by the fact that books belonging to the valuable Wise bequest were allowed to be sold among waste material that encumbered the Library’s shelves. It also highlighted the urgency of the Library’s inadequate accommodation. Up to now Mitchell saw no developments with the building that Cabinet had promised. Not even a site had been decided on. Press reports stressed that the Committee’s finding that the Public Library’s premises were not large enough to accommodate the books and the public had been familiar to the public for years beforehand yet nothing had been done about it. Talk of the library resembled talk of building other public buildings that remained undeveloped. The press were alert to the issue. J. C. L. Fitzpatrick said: ‘Neither the present site nor the accommodation is suitable, and the time has come when the often-announced intention to remedy this public want should be carried into effect.’156 The enquiry confirmed the importance of the Library in the public mind. It also brought to public attention the inadequate reception that Mitchell had received. The press said the government faced a choice between immediate action and break- down. The manner in which the Mitchell collection has been treated should of itself prove sufficient reason for action. The State…has no reason to be proud of the treatment accorded to the public benefactor who presented that valuable library to the people…it is not to the credit of our taste or good management that [a pleasant site and proper accommodation] have been wanting so long.157 This enquiry also made it clear that problems existed with staff perceptions about libraries and their purpose. Certain literature (‘blue’ books) exposed attitudes to what constituted suitable literature in the Library. Readers took a wider view of what

155 Bladen to Anderson, January 12, 1901, PLNSW A/231 (2), 70-71. 155 J. C. L. Fitzpatrick, Old Days. 155 ‘F P L’, SMH, September 14, 1900, 2.; Jones, ‘Friendly Relations’, 25; Dymock died suddenly on October 5, 1900; Legislative Assembly. New South Wales, Report from the Select Committee on Working of the Free Public Library; together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence and appendix (Sydney: Government Printer, 1900). 156 ‘The FPL’, SMH, December 4, 1900, 4. 157 ‘The Public Library Annual Report’, SMH, June 21, 1902, 8.

290 was ‘useful’ literature. The popularity of the 27,000 books (largely fiction) in the lending branch showed this. Press reports supported this as a healthy corrective against the preaching of reading ‘useful’ literature. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: ‘The truth is that many people seem to have become imbued with the idea that a public library should be a solemn thing, the receptacle for literature of only the most serious description.’158 The Press argued that people should be allowed to read what they will. Views about literature had broadened beyond the expectations of library authorities. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: ‘the purpose of libraries and books was to bring more sunshine into the lives of our fellow countrymen, more good will, more good humour, and more of the habit of being pleased with one another’. Something which the paper thought novels do, justifying their popularity with readers. The paper also pointed to the popularity of the newspaper room with ‘hundreds reading newspapers who before read nothing at all’. During 1900, readers read 377 newspapers, over 54,000 single issues from the Australasian colonies and the world.159 Many single issues were destroyed from their constant use. The paper trumpeted the urgency of a new library building toward which little progress had been made. For some time nothing happened. In February 1901 Fitzpatrick was appointed trustee, with Rose Scott’s ally John Creed (who was unafraid to express unpopular opinion). As with earlier debate over a site for Sydney’s art gallery, various sites were suggested for the new library building. One was Queens Square (on the site of the old immigration barracks at the top of King Street where today’s Supreme Court now stands). This stemmed from a motion carried in the Legislative Assembly in 1881 in favour of building a library there (showing the history that existed behind building a proper library for Sydney). Other proposed sites were near the Art Gallery in the Domain (which the Sydney Morning Herald described as too far removed from the city to be conveniently reached); Cook Park (where years before it was to be part of one building that would also house the Art Gallery and the Australian Museum); and the site of the old Education Offices then facing demolition (which the Minister favoured).160

158 SMH, March 18, 1899, 8, 9. 159 Memorandum to Trustees, August 19,1901, MLA/231 (2), 394. 160 ‘The Mitchell Library’, SMH, June 12, 1901, 10.

291 Perry stalled on the issue by announcing in the House in 1901 that competitive designs were to be called for a new public library. A year later he announced that the cost of the new buildings would amount to at least £100,000, and thought it questionable whether the money could be spared.161 However, he intended to bring the matter before the Cabinet, but wanted to call a public competition for the building’s design. Perry was dissembling because he knew no public competition would occur. The Government Architect W. Liberty Vernon (1846-1914) had determined in 1894 that competitions were too costly and unproductive and none were held during the remainder of his tenure (to 1911). Mitchell had made his offer in October 1898 and had given his first instalment of books in mid-1899. Correspondence to Perry had expressed Mitchell’s desire that something should be done promptly, to relieve the great pressure of books in his house.162 In good faith Mitchell continued progressively handing over items to the Public Library. During 1903, he handed over eight works of art including a portrait of Captain John Murray, R. N. of HMS Lady Nelson. A recent purchase (bought sometime during the previous eighteen months), it gives further evidence of the purpose to his buying; he was intent on capturing for historical record (as for a national collection) rather than for himself. The portrait of the discoverer of Port Phillip, attributed to Hubner around 1804, had been offered to Mitchell by Francis Edwards for £40. Mitchell did not think it worth anything approaching that price ‘as Captain Murray was by no means a very famous man in Australian History’.163 He bought pictures mainly for their historical and topographical value and did not think it worthwhile for Edwards to send it to Sydney on approval at that price.164 If he had an opportunity of inspecting it at a more reasonable price, he might very probably be tempted by it. That Edwards sent it shows Mitchell’s buying power. The following year, he handed over 18 volumes of newspapers among them copies of the Sydney Gazette, Daylesford Express and Queensland Guardian. Three more pictures, and seven further titles valued at £200, went in April with forty-four

161 ‘The Free Public Library Proposed New Buildings’, SMH, September 23, 1902, 6; The view that Perry made little effort is expressed by Fletcher, Australian History in New South Wales, 59. 162 Under Secretary, Department of Public Instruction to Mitchell, February 6, 1899, ML1461, 177. 163 Anderson to Francis Edwards, March 27, 1901, ZML1, 316; Captain John Murray, R.N (discoverer of Port Phillip), ca. 1804, oil on canvas, attributed to Hubner, ML22. 164 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 17.

292 volumes handed over in July and another thirty in December. The pictures which Mitchell had already handed over were displayed in the Public Library’s boardroom.165 Despite this display of his good-will, all that Mitchell had seen for his gift was inertia, indecision, and delay. After six years a new site for the Public Library had not been found. The Government was distracted by drought, a general election, and – if Norman Selfe was correct – a general lack of interest.166 According to Selfe, indifference was the distinguishing characteristic of Sydneysiders. He criticised State government administration and culture. He cited the insatiable mania for patronage that stemmed from the system of departmental centralisation (as in the Department of Public Instruction). Powerful under-secretaries desirous of promotion jockeyed for position under weak ministers. To Selfe, large-minded men in a small community were in short supply. By now aged 68, Mitchell was anxious that he may not see a suitable building. In poor health, he ceased visiting the city’s shops around the beginning of the century; booksellers sent up to his house anything they thought he might buy.167 Frustration over the delay in gaining a site for the anticipated new building came to a head in 1904. In February, John Perry said that a site in the Domain by the Art Gallery had been decided on.168 The Progressive Lyne & See Ministry fell in June to the two-month long Government of Progressive Thomas Waddell. Anderson took the unusual step of addressing another Minister about his own Minister’s departmental affairs. He turned to Bernard Ringrose Wise, son of Edward Wise (whose Australiana collection was bequeathed to the library in 1865). An Oxford educated barrister, Wise held a life appointment in the Legislative Council from October 1900, had been Minister of Justice since 1901 and was Acting Premier briefly in March and then again in April and May of 1904. Anderson presented Wise with the history of Mitchell’s case. Wise said that he was dumfounded to learn of the impasse. Anderson learned that Mitchell’s case had never been brought before the Cabinet. It appeared the Chief Secretary’s Department, which was responsible for the

166 Norman Selfe, Sydney: Past, Present and Possible (Sydney: D. S. Ford, Printer, 1906), 1. Selfe, like Mitchell, believed that Sydney owed more to its early rulers than they were credited with. On the depressing saga of protracted government delay see Nelson, ‘Anderson’, 105. 167 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 2. 168 ‘Topics of the Day’, AA, April 5, 1904, 4.

293 Library, had blocked any action or information. Another change of government came in August 1904 with Kiama-born Liberal politician (Sir) Joseph Hector Carruthers (1857-1932) becoming premier. Carruthers was a Sydney solicitor with a reformist agenda. He had been Foundation Member of the University Debating and Literary Society (1874) and a member of the Sydney School of Arts Debating Society. He was a founder of the St George School of Arts and a Trustee of the National Art Gallery from 1899. He was fascinated with the history of Captain Cook and like Wise had served on the Parliamentary Library Committee.169 By May 1905, Carruthers took Mitchell in hand. He interviewed him, brought the matter before the Cabinet, and sent Anderson to the Department of Lands to identify land that may be earmarked for the Library without legislation. Heartened by this activity, Mitchell added a codicil to his will in early October of 1905, which added a further £40,000 to his offer. This brought the total of his gift to £70,000, ‘proportionately in case my estate should be insufficient to provide for all the said legacies.’170 Through October 1905 the Public Works Committee thrashed out where and how the collection would be housed. A plan existed that had been drawn up by Vernon to Anderson’s specifications. Vernon designed a building in Italian Renaissance style of two wings with a central reading room and a large central dome.171 Ironically, despite seeming little political will nor funds for it, the question of Mitchell’s library had become such a public issue that some viewed it as a ‘national monument’. Statistician and Superintendent of Technical Education at the Department of Public Instruction, (later Sir) George H Knibbs (1858-1929) argued that a National library should be built with an eye to the future.172 Compared with other public monuments in the large cities of the world, he berated the scale of Vernon’s proposed design as too meagre for a national building. Future critics would say it was not large enough to be expressive of Australian architecture. He favoured calling for competitive designs, and suggested housing the library in a temporary building until the Government could put up, in sections if necessary, a more imposing structure. He

169 J. H. Carruthers, Captain James Cook, R.N., One Hundred and Fifty Years After (London: Murray, 1930). He was also noted as a sportsman, playing cricket for Sydney University (where he received his MA in 1879) and later turning to bowls and becoming one of the best bowlers in the State. 170 Codicil to Will, David Scott Mitchell, October 3, 1905, Merewether Estate A, 13b. 171 For Vernon’s design see Jones, A Source of Inspiration, 44, 46. 172 ‘A National Monument Proposed’, SMH, October 20, 1905, 5.

294 considered the estimated cost of around £100,000 for the proposed national library, including the Mitchell branch, was totally inadequate for the purpose intended.173 Such a monument to be worthy of the country ought to cost £500,000, and (be sufficient for at least 150 years). It would, in his opinion, be better to put up a temporary building rather than erect an inferior structure as a national monument. George Robertson was angered by the delay that had been shown concerning the building for a gift of such importance as Mitchell’s. Far from happy about the indecision that he saw, he read a statement before the Committee. ‘After six or seven years’ he said, ‘the value of the gift Mr. Mitchell has offered to this State, and the danger of delay in complying with his conditions, appear to have dawned on a Government.’ He slammed home the point that Mitchell’s general library (apart from the Australasian collection) was richer in illustrated books and first editions of celebrated works than all the State libraries put together. Then he confined his remarks to the Australasian portion because ‘it is of paramount importance to the State.’ It angered him when he heard of the collection spoken about in terms of money value.174 It was immeasurable in money value being ‘incomparably the best as far as Australian literature was concerned.’175 Nor could the best board of trustees in the world have assembled it. He warned that the State was lucky to have so much put beyond the reach of wealthy American libraries (‘so wealthy they are at their wit’s end to know how to spend their revenue’) who were sweeping up British and European treasures and would undoubtedly soon turn their attention seriously to Australiana. Mitchell’s gift was princely and should be housed in a dedicated building. It was a collection of the unique and the special because ‘Mr. Mitchell has never willingly allowed the rare thing to escape him’. Nor had he not neglected ordinary Australians, and an item ‘which looks unimportant now will assume a different aspect in time to come…the time will arrive when from all parts of the world

173 Perry thought the cost of the new buildings would amount to at least £100,000: ‘Proposed New Buildings’, SMH, September 23, 1902, 6; The total cost of the scheme estimated by the Government Architect was £114,044: ‘The Mitchell Library, Where should it be located?’, SMH, October 14, 1905, 14. 174 Here he was referring to remarks made by A. G. Stephens, literary critic and editor of the Bulletin, who argued the public were entitled to know what the real value of Mitchell’s collection was before any sum was spent on building to house it. This angered Mitchell: Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 23. 175 ‘A National Monument Proposed to cost £500,000’, SMH, October 20, 1905, 4.

295 men will come to consult it on points relating to Australia.’ He urged that Mitchell’s collection be considered as a whole. A hundred years hence one might as well offer to purchase the Bodleian Library at Oxford as the Mitchell Library in Sydney. He warned the State to avoid being compared with the Prévost of Eton, who caused the antiquary and scholar Jacob Bryant (bap.1717-1804) to change the destination of his library from Eton to King's College, Cambridge, because Eton quibbled over the question of freight.176 The Sydney Morning Herald supported Robertson. In mid-October 1905 the paper described Mitchell’s gift as one of the most generous offers which have been ever made to any State. It said it was shameful and disgraceful that Mitchell’s one condition that the State should house his collection decently and separately had not been fulfilled. It stressed the urgency of the situation (mindful of Mitchell’s advancing age). It said that what was needed was not a palatial building big enough to house another British museum (as Knibbs proposed), but finding a decent and presentable home for Mitchell’s books. Unless Parliament insisted on achieving this, Mitchell’s unique library would be lost to the State. The paper pointed to the collection being beyond valuation. It held irreplaceable material which Mitchell wanted to let everybody have the use of: ‘There is no such Australian library in the world as the Mitchell collection. It is a monument of long, intelligent and patriotic labour devoted to a great purpose and rendered possible only by a considerable fortune.’177 The Herald recommended the site on the Outer Domain that had been intended for Parliament Buildings, where the foundation stone for the new Parliament House was laid in 1888: ‘It is melancholy to think that the reasonable condition imposed by the donor has not yet been fulfilled and that the State may yet lose this unrivalled library.’ The Herald lamented the lack of encouragement offered by the State to induce private owners of valuable and interesting manuscripts to hand them over. Taking the Mitchell library as an example (‘a gift the great value of which is probably not known to any one beyond the owner and possibly one or two others’), it pointed to how poorly that ‘noble gift’ had been received by the State. ‘Has a single effort been made to house and make it available? What must the donor’s feelings be, and what inducement is there for owners of such valuable books as Banks’ MSS

176 ‘The Mitchell Library’, SMH, October 20, 1905, 4. Bryant was a discerning collector of early books. 177 ‘The Mitchell Library’, SMH, October 17, 1905.

296 Journal to hand them over to the State when one recollects the treatment accorded to Mr David Mitchell.’178 One can only guess at how perturbed Mitchell must have been over the delay. Delays on deciding on a site for the Library rankled. After making his offer in 1898, Mitchell waited over eight long years to see his objective achieved. Yet somewhat like the Charles Dickens’ character, Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend (1865), he scorned ‘being Patronized’. Boffin scorned the self-importance that benefactors assumed and how they were promoted (‘puffed up’ as he put it) like ‘Pills, or Hair-Washes, or Invigorating Nervous Essences’. Mitchell did not want to ‘puff’, preferring to quietly patronise those bodies which he supported (like the School of Industry).179 It was in his nature to be patient, but his customary reserve and discrete approach did little to advance plans for the badly needed library building. To convey the impression of Mitchell’s reserve, it is said that he refused interviews in later life; in fact Mitchell, despite having ‘shut the door on interviewers and photographers’, instigated a pivotal interview with the Evening News, a copy of which Anderson sent to Carruthers.180 As the more recent Australiana bibliophile Rodney Davidson (b.1933) points out, the magnitude and importance of Mitchell’s offer were not appreciated, and the slow moving wheels of negotiation must have extremely disappointed him.181 At the end of October, the State’s Public Works Committee reported in favour of erecting a building on a site facing Macquarie Street and adjoining the grounds of Parliament House. An Act was passed authorising the erection of a national Library, with a special wing to be known as the Mitchell Wing. In December 1905 the Public Works Committee approved Vernon’s scheme. The façade would overlook the Garden Palace Grounds and the level nature and open character of site was praised for offering light and ventilation considered as essential for a library. Vernon’s design was flanked on the western side by the portion to be devoted to the Mitchell Library.

178 ‘Sir Joseph Banks’, SMH, January 30, 1905, 8. 179 D. S. Mitchell annual membership subscription, December 7, 1903, DSM Miscellaneous Papers ML A1461. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 1:297 (DSM/823.83/D). 180 ‘The Mitchell Library, The Selection of a site, Interview with Mr Mitchell, quite satisfied with the choice’, Evening News, November 29, 1905, in Mitchell Library Press Clippings, vol. 1. Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 7; Jones, Friendly Relations, 34, 47. 181 Rodney Davidson, A Book Collector’s Notes on items relating to the Discovery of Australia, the First Settlement, and the Early Coastal Exploration of the Continent (Melbourne: Cassell, 1970), 9.

297 The State shelved the scheme to build the whole edifice to cost £114,000 and only proceeded with the scheme for the Mitchell Library portion to cost approximately £21,500. Judging from press reports there was disappointment that Vernon’s plan for a ‘complete classic building’ was thwarted. Press reports remarked how Sydney is truly noted for its unfinished public buildings. They pointed to the unfinished central railway station and the Art Gallery as examples of similar botched plans. Unsightly in their unfinished state, the Press argued that not only did these buildings reflect poorly on Sydney, but responsible authorities were short-sighted because completing them later would be much more costly and they would never be as effective in general appearance.182

7.4 Reading Mitchell: The librarian and the bibliophile George Robertson (who held Mitchell in high regard) encouraged Anderson to write his recollections of Mitchell, yet never published them. Robertson and his later partner Fred Wymark told Anderson’s successor, William Herbert Ifould (1877– 1969), that they decided that Anderson’s account was unpublishable. They shelved it. Robertson told Ifould, ‘I remember feeling glad it had gone into my safe, not another’s. Most of the half-truths and belittling stories that have been told about Mitchell since his death have had an Andersonian source.’183 This has to be considered when reading a document that Anderson lodged with the Mitchell Library four years before he died. He wrote a handwritten account, consisting of 70 pages of small, tight handwriting, entitled David Scott Mitchell, Some Reminiscences.184 Written in early 1920, Anderson described his dealings with Mitchell, suggesting that ‘it is only fitting that the friends and admirers of David Scott Mitchell should place on record such facts and impressions as they can supply, with a view to giving future generations of students and patriotic Australians some idea of the man who did so much for their benefit.’ Anderson’s account was no panegyric, and says more about Anderson than it does about Mitchell. Anderson described the Public Library’s Australiana collection

182 SMH, December 26, 1905, 3. 183 Robertson to Ifould, August 28, 1925, Angus & Robertson Correspondence 1884-1932, ML MSS 314/60, 318. According to Anderson, Robertson had asked him to write a short memoir of Mitchell: Angus & Robertson Correspondence 1884-1932, ML MSS 314/60345 ff. 184 H. C. L. Anderson, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, ML MSS A1830.

298 in 1893 as ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ by, as he described it, the maleficient actions of a ‘dreadful human bogey, whose lair was in 17 Darlinghurst Road’.185 He described Mitchell as a ‘hated rival’, who ‘got the first choice of everything rare and valuable, gave extravagant prices, kept his treasures locked up in his ‘dungeon’, refused access to visitors, was a mere bibliomaniac who collected without knowledge or discrimination, for the mere pleasure of owning, and generally left the State Library lamenting and resentful’. Robertson was correct to dismiss Anderson’s picture of Mitchell because it was far from true. In 1893, Mitchell’s Australiana collection surpassed any other in existence. The Library possessed comparatively little Australiana; it even sold some of Edward Wise’s collection.186 There is no evidence to support any of Anderson’s assertions on Mitchell’s character, knowledge or discrimination. Mitchell had systematically amassed material that by its variety and content was broad and comprehensive. In bringing this material together he built an integrated collection that was unique, like many of the items that it contained.187 Correspondence shows that prices Mitchell paid when he relied on Anderson’s help were higher than when he was buying alone and prudently. Anderson’s reflection is odd given that he could not have developed the library without Mitchell. Curiously, Anderson’s tone partly resembles the caution given in an earlier edition of the English journal of Britain’s Bibliographical Society, The Library:

Let the librarian of any library guard against that vicious state of mind which makes him, like the dragon in the fable, sit upon the treasures he guards, and deny for public use the literary wealth which has been gathered together for the greatest public benefit. For why, indeed, should these

185 Anderson, ‘Mitchell’, 2.; Also, Ellis, ‘Truth’, 92. 186 Duplicate copies from the Public Library of rare books relating to Australia and Polynesia were sold without reserve in July 1897 by Sydney auctioneers Lawson: James R, Lawson Pty. Ltd. Important sale by auction, without reserve, at Lawson & Smith’s auction rooms, 128-132 Pitt Street (near King Street) under instructions from Messrs. Angus & Robertson, the duplicate copies of rare books recently purchased from Public Library of New South Wales…(Sydney: Websdale, Shoosmith & Co., Printers, 1897) (DSM/042/P89). 187 Nelson, Anderson, 101.

299 books be collected with such pains by the wise and the rich, except for the advancement, honour, and ornament of knowledge?188

Clearly, Anderson felt he had been overshadowed by Mitchell. There was scope for misunderstanding on both their parts. Skyrocketing prices paid for historic material (more so in the field of rare books and maps than in Australiana) meant that Anderson had to rely on Mitchell. By the turn of the century only the very wealthy could be serious book collectors. Ironically, the parliamentary Select Committee into the library in mid-1900 noted that Mitchell was not wealthy compared to his American counterparts. Anderson may have fuelled speculation about Mitchell’s wealth, such as when he wrote to Paris antiquarian Charles Chadenat that Mitchell was by far the most important purchaser, who would be most happy to order ‘any books relating to Australasia in its widest sense – no matter how expensive – which he may not already have in his collection.’ Anderson told Amsterdam dealers Frederick Muller & Co that Mitchell ‘is always ready to buy anything however expensive if it is really of value to the student of Australian history or exploration.’189 While it was true that Mitchell was interested in obtaining material, Anderson’s remarks could have been misconstrued in the heated atmosphere that typified fin-de-siècle book collecting. Even in Australia there was general expectation of rising prices. The First folio of Shakespeare that Tangye presented to the Public Library in 1885, encased in wood from Stratford, cost close to £500. Not long after Baroness Burdett-Coutts paid £600 for a similar copy, and one coming up in a forthcoming 1885 sale was reported by the Northern Territory Times as being expected to fetch £900.190 In 1898, Anderson believed the value had risen to £1000.191 Rising prices were particularly anticipated with patrimonial material owing to growing sensitivity to its increasing scarcity. This was seen with dramatic prices paid at the sale of items belonging to collector Richard Garnett (1835-1906), British Museum Keeper of Printed Books, in

188 Jean Baptiste Cotton Des Houssayes, The Duties & Qualifications of a Librarian: A Discourse Pronounced in the General Assembly of the Sorbonne, December 23, 1780 (Chicago: McClurg, 1906); J Y W. Macalister, ed. with Leopold Delisle, Melvil Dewey, Carl Dziatzko, Richard Garnett, The Library A Quarterly Review of Bibliography and Library Lore, New Series (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1904), 187. 189 Anderson to Muller, January 7, 1902, ML ZML1, 491. 190 NTT&G, February 14, 1885, 3. 191 ‘Library Association Australasia’, SMH, October 7, 1898, 3.

300 1906. An American buyer paid £3,000 for three notebooks by the poet Percy Bysse Shelley bearing autographed matter by him. The price paid for these manuscripts showed how the price of literary relics had risen dramatically.192 If Mitchell had continued buying beyond 1907 he would have found prices became so elevated that he may have found collecting to be beyond him. Unprecedented prices were paid for English books in the sale of Henry Huth’s library in 1911.193 It became hard to obtain fine English material.194 In fact, by the 1890s Mitchell only considered early English material that added to his Australian collection. When defending himself against charges of conflicting interest when acting as ‘agent’ for Mitchell and handling orders for him, Anderson told the Select Committee inquiring into the Public Library that he ‘sent away £670 last week for one book…he [Mitchell] spends £2000 a year on fresh books’.195 Anderson said the Library did not spend £10 a year on Australian books: ‘we are looking to Mr Mitchell to do all that’.196 While foremost in Australia, Mitchell’s bibliophilic activity was comparatively modest compared to American collectors like J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington.197 Anderson disagreed that Mitchell was wealthy, saying that Mitchell ‘could not afford to neglect any savings he can legitimately make in buying books’.198 By nature thrifty, Mitchell declined to buy items if he thought prices being asked were too high. Perhaps Anderson misconstrued Mitchell’s financial caution as niggardly.199 Ironically, George Robertson found Anderson hard to please and very tight with funds. Mitchell’s knowledge is clear from Anderson’s letters. Mitchell knew the material he had, and what items needed to be found for the collection. Remarkably, he

192 Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, 6 December 1906; Daily Telegraph, December 7, 1906; The scarcity of literary relics saw possessiveness over them grow so that British press reports viewed the shipping of Shelley’s notebooks to New York as example of British Patrimony being menaced by American annexation. 193 ‘The Huth Sale’, Times, November 16, 1911, 6. Much of Huth’s library came from the library of the Lancashire parson Reverend Thomas Corser, so contained many rare items. The Times estimated that Huth’s library, on which he had spent about £120,000, could realize upwards of £250,000 if sold intact. 194 Pearson, ‘Private libraries’, 196. 195 NSW Legislative Assembly, 1900, 12; quoted in Jones, ‘Relations’, 25. 196 NSW Legislative Assembly, 1900, 114; quoted in Jones, ‘Relations’, 25. 197 Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books’, 78. 198 Legislative Assembly. New South Wales, Free Public Library, 93. 199 When an inscribed document from Maggs Brothers was declined, the letter refusing their offer reminded them that their letter of offer came unstamped. Under instructions, Anderson complained that ‘Mr Mitchell had to pay five pence postage on it.’Anderson to Maggs Bros. December 23, 1904, ML 1, 821.

301 relied on memory alone. No catalogue existed for the more than 30,000 items shelved and stacked throughout his home. Anderson lacked Mitchell’s expertise, and it appears he did not adequately appreciate it. He bought what he thought was an original watercolour by James Cleveley (fl.1770-1779). Mitchell immediately showed him the engraved lines under the painted wash. Anderson had paid seven guineas for a print that had been coloured over, and for which Angus & Robertson were asking five guineas for an exactly similar item in the art gallery adjacent to their bookshop. Anderson appeared not to have trusted Mitchell’s judgement, which was endorsed by the authorities at the National Gallery to whom Anderson took the supposed watercolour for a second opinion.200 This episode reflects an interesting aspect to their relationship. Anderson could learn much from Mitchell, who was the scholar-librarian and the true custodian of print. Anderson was the driver at the Library, but Mitchell with his expertise provided direction for the collection. Mitchell resembled the kind of man librarians were once expected to be, when librarianship was seen as a sinecure that made a literary or studious career possible. Anderson was a modern public servant, ambitious to deliver results so to ‘keep our Library in the front place’.201 . The new arrangements with Anderson were not always smooth. Mitchell always paid promptly. Under the new arrangement (with payments and deliveries made through the Chief Secretary’s Department to the Agent General in London), French and German dealers complained to Anderson about lengthy delays in payments to them for items they had despatched months before. Anderson was anxious to keep this from Mitchell. Predictably, Mitchell noticed that few valuable works were being offered to him and he frequently expressed to Anderson his opinion that this must be due to dilatory payments of accounts. Anderson must have tried to keep details of these delays from Mitchell because in January 1902, Anderson wrote to the Under Secretary for Finance and Trade that he was ashamed to tell Mitchell that ‘accounts which he paid through me into the treasury in April last have not yet been

200 Anderson to W. T. Spencer, December 29, 1903, SML1, 742; Joan Kerr, The Dictionary of Australian Artists, Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 164. Confusion remains today over work executed by the marine painter John Cleveley the Younger (1747-1786) and his twin brother Robert (1747-1809), who were both artists. Etchings engraved by Francis Jukes and published by Thos. Martyn in 1787 were watercoloured over, and produced in large quantities for the eighteenth century public that were fascinated by Cook’s expedition on the ‘Resolution’. 201 Anderson to P. G. King, July 5, 1902, ML ZML1, 566.

302 despatched from Sydney.’202 Mitchell’s eye for detail added to the pressures on Anderson. In one instance, Anderson apologised to a Bristol bookseller that he had overlooked an item when making an order nine days before. This was for the proceedings of the court martial to try Rev. Benjamin Vale (1788-1863) in 1817.203 His apprehension is palpable in his letter: what would Mitchell have made of this rare item failing to come from an order that he placed with Anderson? There is a sense that Anderson was often chasing his tail. Mitchell found that Anderson’s assistance strained the long-standing relations that Mitchell enjoyed with many local booksellers. They resented Anderson’s ‘muscling-in’ on their trade with Mitchell that deprived them of a regular living. Moreover, local booksellers whom Mitchell knew found Anderson upsetting in manner. Mitchell remained discrete about his views on Anderson, whom he may have found did not fully appreciate the literary wealth he had taken a lifetime to gather. A family trait (shown by James Mitchell and Rose Scott) was an aversion to factions and squabbles that limited outlook and power for good. As Rose Scott put it, ‘In public work never descend to personal abuse of the opposite side…Be sure of your facts, and do not forget that every cause demands patience, self-sacrifice, and eternal vigilance’.204 However, Mitchell’s anxiety increased as time went by without progress made towards a building for the Library. According to James Tyrrell, Mitchell became impatient at the delay from the Government. He told George Robertson that ‘unless the Government hurried up, over his offer to the State, he would turn the offer over to the Sydney University.’205

202 Anderson to Under Secretary, Finance and Trade, January 16, 1902, ML1, 507-8. 203 Anderson to William George’s Sons, September 18, 1902, ZML, 604; Proceedings of a general court martial, ordered by Governor Macquarie, to try the Rev. Benjamin Vale, for seizing an American vessel trading in Sydney Cove (London: Printed by Joyce Gold and published by J. Asperne, 1817) (DSM/ C 471). 204 Untitled press clipping, June 19, 1880, Eldridge Papers, ML MSS6318. 205 According to Arthur Jose, in about 1897 Mitchell thought of leaving his collection to the University; it lacked space and money to house it ‘unless the Government could be persuaded to grant some.’: Jose, Mitchell, 469; Tyrrell, Mitchell, 16. A library building was being designed by Liberty Vernon’s office for the University’s Fisher Library.

303 Chapter Eight Conclusion: Cultural Legacy

8.1 Changing Culture: From Private Beneficence to State Patronage of Culture

In the early days of Federation, when the search for a Federal Capital was underway, the Australian state libraries vied for the title of being the truly national collection. As the interim federal capital was Melbourne, focus turned to that State’s public library. Describing its collection in 1899, an international directory said that Melbourne’s library, with an annual income from government grants of £3500, spent about £1500 on books and had ‘a special collection of works relating to Australia and South Sea Islands’.1 However, Melbourne came late to realizing the significance of husbanding Australian manuscripts. Acquiring historic documents was desultory and passive.2 Tasmania’s Public Library opened in 1859, but fell heavily into debt before re-opening in 1870 with endowments from colonial and municipal governments. In 1907 the library opened a new building, financed by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. Its holdings were comparatively small: astonishingly, in the years 1900- 1905 over 568,000 visits were recorded for just over 22,000 items held.3 Wrangling continued over Petherick’s Australasian collection of books and other material. Smaller than Mitchell’s collection, Petherick’s would eventually be bought in 1911 by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in Melbourne (and ultimately lead to the National Library of Australia). In 1904, this parliamentary library, like other colonial parliamentary libraries, housed more than colonial legislators needed in a working library. Its chairman, Sir Frederick Holder (1850- 1909), the first speaker of the House of Representatives, believed the library should sweepingly be ‘the home of the literature, not of a state, or of a period, but of the world, and all time’. Queensland’s Public Library officially opened in 1902, originating in 1896

1 Tony Marsh, ‘The Australian Manuscript Collection’, LaTrobe Library Journal 12, no. 47-48 (1991): 76. 2 Marsh, ‘Manuscript Collection’, 76. 3 Tasmanian Public Library, Outline of the History of the Institution 1849-1920: Jubilee Year under its new Constitution, 1870-1920, (Hobart: Tasmanian Public Library, 1920), 5. State Library of Tasmania, ‘Your Library 150 Years’ http://odi.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/Resources/Framer.asp?URL=%2F2000%2F1%2F007%2F&Catalogue =RDS&Keywords=public+library&x=0&y=0&ID=00215515 (accessed online March 20, 21010).

304 from a private collection of Queensland Supreme Court Judge, George Harding (1838-1895). West Australia’s Legislative Assembly kick-started a public library in Perth with a £5000 grant in August 1886 to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Victoria Public Library was renamed the Public Library of Western Australia in 1904. Amalgamated with the museum and art gallery, the library occupied temporary and cramped premises until it was established in a permanent home in 1913. It was fortunate in having as librarian James Battye (1871-1954), who avidly collected Western Australian historical material. No other collection matched Mitchell’s; this is clear from a summary of selected Australian Public Library collections tabled in a 1935 report.4 In 1905, Anderson correctly told New Bond Street booksellers Messrs Ellis that Mitchell’s collection of Australiana ‘is already by far the finest in the world.’5 Mitchell intended that his library be a working library meant for students of Australian history, which is why he specified that it be kept for use in a special wing or set of rooms dedicated for that purpose. He wanted to ‘avoid intermixture at any time with any other books or collection or collections’ because his collection had been assembled from the start with the special purpose to offer a window into Australian history.6 In New South Wales Australian history was part of the primary and high school curriculum from the 1880s, but it was not until 1891 that a Chair of History was established at the University (and it would not be until the 1930s that systematic study of Australian history would be offered to undergraduates).7 The day Mitchell turned 70, tenders were called for building the Mitchell Wing of the new building for the State Library. Construction work began in April 1906. Mitchell was invited to lay the foundation stone but he was too frail. Through Anderson, he replied to Carruthers that, while very much gratified at the courtesy and consideration shown to him, his state of health denied him even the pleasure of witnessing the ceremony, much less of taking any active part in it. Mitchell wrote that Carruthers should enjoy any honour which might possibly belong to the proposed ceremony ‘in view of the active personal interest you have taken in this matter and the

4 Ralph Munn and Ernest R. Pitt, Australian Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for their Improvement, Introduction by Frank Tate (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia 1935/1967). 5 Anderson to Messrs Ellis, New Bond Street, November 1905, ML1, 850s. 6 Last Will and Testament of David Scott Mitchell, February 14, 1901, ML MSQ026.994/6. 7 Fletcher, A Passion for the Past, 2; idem, Australian History in New South Wales, 30, 84-90

305 vigorous way in which it is being pressed to a happy conclusion, that is, having in mind the absolute indifference shown by previous ministers of public instruction and others who might have helped on the movement.’8 Mitchell’s conciliatory statement was read aloud by Anderson. He asked that two coincidences be placed on record. First, he was born within a few hundred feet of the site of the corner stone of the Mitchell Library. His father was medical officer to the old 48th regiment afterwards Colonial Surgeon and a prominent figure in the first Legislative Council, a director of the AMP Society at its foundation and a very prominent figure in the public life of the State 50 years ago. Second, tenders were invited for the building of the Mitchell Library on his 70th birthday, which seemed to him to be a very good omen and he hoped to see the building complete and his treasures handed over to the State. The foundation stone for the Mitchell Wing was laid on September 11, 1906. Carruthers, acting for Mitchell, laid the freestone block faced with an entablature naming Mitchell as the donor of the Library. In his speech Carruthers gave a brief biographic account of Mitchell as being one of the University’s first students, who distinguished himself in the cricket field and in other manly sports, and never went to the bar as he found the management of his large estate in the Hunter Valley sufficient to absorb his energies. Carruthers mentioned that Mitchell was once offered the position of Attorney General which, he said, indicated the opinion held by at least one Premer of Mitchell’s abilities and potential value to the State. Describing Mitchell’s library as ‘unquestionably the largest purely Australian library in the world’, Carruthers said that Mitchell wished to present it to his native land; ‘it was the one great object of Mitchell’s life.’9 Cheers were given to the King and for Mr. Mitchell. Carruthers flagged the need for Sydney’s Municipal Council to fund a Library for ‘literary recreation’ through rates. Here Carruthers flagged that the Public Library saw its mission as limited to the ‘more strictly educational functions of a great Reference Library and Archives of National History’.10 Anderson (whose brother was the treasurer of the Council) did not mention this to Mitchell. Nor did the Council respond. The Public Library trustees were disappointed that the coming building would be ‘only a flank of the great National Library, which we so badly want, and

8 Anderson to Carruthers, June 20,1906, ML Letters In 1906, 06-1427. 9 ‘Mitchell Library, Foundation Stone Laid’, SMH, September 12, 1906, 9. 10 Bladen, Historical Notes, 78.

306 with which we hope the Government may soon see its way to proceed’.11 Anderson thought press reports of the ceremony were unsatisfactory. Mitchell was indifferent; he had achieved his aim. His library would be as Carruthers put it ‘a great electric chain that links together the great families of the human race, past as well as present.’12 It would place in ‘youth’s hands the story of our nation with its noble achievements and its illustrious men’. Anderson was appointed in 1905 as director of the State's new Intelligence Department (a precursor to today’s Department of Tourism). From January 1907 he became government statistician as well.13 The responsibility to assist Mitchell was transferred to Frank Bladen. Up to then, Bladen had been in charge of the lending branch of the library and he followed Anderson as principal librarian. Among the letters which Anderson received congratulating him on the achievement was one from the principal librarian of South Australia’s Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery. He expressed what Mitchell knew. He referred to the national benefactor that Mitchell was: ‘our generous benefactor, for Mr Mitchell’s princely gift is one which will in perpetuity cause him to be gratefully remembered by every original student of Australasian history and affairs throughout the Continent.’14 Mitchell’s gift meant more than a library for Sydney: ‘It will be the everlasting pride of New South Wales to be the Custodian of that collection, but it will be the privilege of Australasia and of the world to go to Sydney and use that collection’. Interestingly, the Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery of South Australia had just received about £65,000 from Welsh-born Adelaide surgeon Thomas Morgan (1824-1903) who had frequented the Adelaide Circulating Library and the magazine room of the Public Library of South Australia. He is thought to have left his gift incorrectly, believing that the Adelaide Circulating Library was conducted by the board of the Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery.15 His gift was so surprising to South Australia’s

11 Bladen, Historical Notes, 82. 12 Bladen, Historical Notes, 79. 13 He ultimately became the acting under-secretary and director of a new Department of Agriculture. While clearly able, Anderson ended his career embittered that much of his effort had been futile. For a summary of his activities, see C. J. King, ‘Anderson, Henry Charles Lennox (1853–1924)’, ADB, online at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/anderson-henry-charles-lennox-5016/text8343, accessed 4 September 2011. 14 Adams to Anderson, September 25, 1906, ML Letters In 1906, 540. 15 Observer (Adelaide), March 21, 1903, 14; Menz, ‘Bequests’, 114, 122-3. Menz regards the Morgan Thomas Bequest (1903-2003), with the Elder Bequest (1897-1997) – both directed purely to develop collections, to exemplify the joint benefits of private and public funds.

307 Public Library that it was believed he had made a mistake. Far from giving up collecting, Mitchell was building a bookplate collection. His little collection of bookplates, mostly of English and Australian owners, with designs by well-known artists from Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) to Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), now numbered about 4,000. This collection resembled a capping stone to all that he had assembled over his lifetime. He wanted a plate by the English artist William Nicholson (1872-1949), then known for his striking graphic work produced with his brother-in-law James Pryde (1866-1941) (as the Beggarstaff Brothers). Bertram Stevens sent one he found, hoping it was the example Mitchell desired. When in late 1906, the library of the late Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B. (the keeper of the Printed books at the British Museum) was sold, Mitchell sought only Garnett’s bookplate and none of his books.16 Mitchell already owned several copies of Garnett’s titles written over thirty years. It is interesting to reflect on similarities between Mitchell and Garnett, whose reputation Mitchell undoubtedly knew. Garnett was described as a scholar, whose exhaustive knowledge evoked ‘one of those medieval librarians who really knew the inside of their stock’.17 Garnett’s obituary described him as ‘one of those uncanny magicians of letters who, on being asked for a certain passage, could say off-hand: ‘iambilicus, Page 46, third line from bottom: go to the tenth room, fourth case, third shelf, then behind on the second row you will find a book bound in green.’ Similar accounts exist about Mitchell and the way he knew what was in his books and where anything could be found in them.18 To Arthur Jose, ‘David Mitchell knew his collections as a student, not as a collector only. He took the heart out of every book he bought, and knew the gist of most of his documents.’ To Jose, Mitchell’s scholarly ‘memory was marvellous’. At the British Museum’s library, Garnett enjoyed the respect that its milieu and fellowships gave him. Similarly important to Mitchell were the friendships that he enjoyed with younger scholars (like Brereton and Stevens). Their friendships gave Mitchell a literary companionship resembling that which Garnett enjoyed. Garnett wrote widely across a number of subjects including helping (later Sir) Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), who began his working life as a clerk in the library of the British

16 Anderson to E. Menken, September 26, 1906, ML 1, 894. 17 Ernest A Savage, The Story of Libraries and Book-collecting (New York: Burt Franklin, (1909)/1969), 142. James Hunecker, ‘The Late Dr Richard Garnett’, NYT, June 9, 1906, BR373. 18 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 468-9; Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 581, 585.

308 Museum, with a four volumed account of English Literature. Mitchell did not write but undeniably influenced others who did. Example of this comes from Bertram Stevens’ anthology of Australian verse that George Robertson published in September 1906. This was dedicated to Mitchell; on the front Stevens also inscribed his thanks for Mitchell’s encouragement.19 Besides Mitchell, Stevens acknowledged help from a small circle in Sydney, which included Arthur Jose, Alfred Lee and John Le Gay Brereton – all belonging to Mitchell’s circle.20 John Le Gay Brereton gives us a picture of Mitchell’s generosity. Brereton expressed his pleasure at the laying of the foundation stone as public recognition, ‘– so long delayed – of your munificence.’21 He reminded Mitchell of his kindness to him as a schoolboy: ‘You came early among my benefactors: even now I can feel – can actually recall – the schoolboy’s thrill (the queer tingling that made him feel that he must be walking with alternately an equine prance and a shuffle of hobbles) as he made off with a volume of Dyce’s Webster. I have no doubt my thanks were clumsy, but my gratitude for that loan and for kindred acts of kindness since is real – and I am no less clumsy now.’ Arthur Jose describes how Mitchell’s library and knowledge was accessible, particularly ‘to young authors wrestling with Australian problems’ whom ‘he encouraged mightily’.22 Jose was of the opinion that Mitchell was generous with his purse, believing that individuals who benefited by him ‘have never yet suspected the source of their good luck.’ Manning Clark in his History of Australia makes reference to Mitchell in regards to an appeal for money from Henry Lawson, whom Mitchell helped.23 As ever, items were offered to Mitchell; and friends were on the lookout for him. Bertram Stevens got hold of and negotiated finds. One owner hoped to sell Robert Browning’s Selections with an autograph inscription. Stevens reported she had an exaggerated idea of their value. She would not accept the price Mitchell offered, so Stevens returned them to her.24 Mitchell also continued to delight in the

19 Bertram Stevens, An Anthology of Australian Verse (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1906) (DSM/ A821.08/ 96A1). 20 Stevens also acknowledged (later Sir) Walter Murdoch (1874-1970) from Melbourne and Fred Johns (1868-1932) in Adelaide. 21 Le Gay Brereton to Mitchell, September 11, 1906, ML MSS1461/306. 22 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 469. 23 Manning Clark, A History of Australia, vol. 5, The People Make Laws (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1981), 260. 24 Stevens to Mitchell, November 21, 1905, ML MSS1461/287.

309 autographs he was collecting. He held over 400 autographs including from Queen Anne (1707), the composer Daniel Auber (1782-1871), the English journalist and Zionist Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), to the American-born actress Mary Anderson (1859-1940).25 Four deliveries were made to Mitchell during the fortnight beginning on 20 December 1906. They came from Alfred Lee whose Australiana collection Mitchell knew. Lee said they were on terms ‘of very great intimacy, being for many years joint collectors’.26 Lee appreciated the scope of Mitchell’s collection. He was able many times to add to it ‘by reporting to him items of which I had a copy, or, offering him items that I considered the price was too great.’ Between them, they agreed that neither collection would be sold except to one of them. Mitchell is supposed to have urged Lee to give his collection to the State at the same time as Mitchell gave his, which Lee felt he could not do owing to his family commitments. Instead he sold his collection to Mitchell. Just before Christmas in 1906, Lee sent Mitchell several packages and a six page list which covered the whole of Lee’s collection.27 Because both knew each other’s collection, Lee’s list was a formality, more generic than particular with few items individually listed. Many items in Lee’s collection duplicated those which Mitchell held. Lee’s gems were Joseph Bank’s Journal of his voyage with Captain Cook from which John Hawkesworth (c.1715-1773) compiled his monumental account of Cook’s voyages (1773); a series of twenty manuscript letters from Governor Phillip to Sir Joseph Banks; a Commonplace book belonging to Banks containing a large number of letters from various people, including one from Captain Cook; a draft of coinage by Sir Joseph Banks for New Holland; and the pamphlets by Portuguese navigator Captain Peter Ferdinand de Queirós (1563-1615), Terra Australis incognita, or, A new southerne discouerie.28

25 A list dated February 11, 1904 written by someone other than Mitchell totals 479 autographs. ML C373 List of Autographs. No study has as yet been made of this discrete collection. 26 Lee to Anderson, July 22,1922, ML MSS1461/366-7. 27 Lee to Mitchell, ML MSS1461/335-340. 28 Joseph Banks Endeavour Journal, August 25, 1768 to July 12, 1771; Series 37: letters with related papers and journal extract, received by Banks from Arthur Phillip 1787-1792, 1794-1796; Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, Terra Australis incognita, or, A new southerne discouerie, containing a fifth part of the worl: lately found out by Ferdinand de Quir, a Spanish capitaine neuer before published. (London: Printed for Iohn Hodgetts, 1617); idem, Relation Herrn Petri Fernandes de Quir, Spanischen Hauptmans u. So er Konig. May. in Spanien u. Von dem new erfundnem vierten theil der Welt (so

310 De Queirós, a pilot in the Spanish navy who crossed the Pacific from America, thought he discovered the southern continent when in Melanesia in 1605-1610; in fact he found Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. However, his naming it ‘Austrialia del Espiritu Santo’ was the origin of the name Australia, which appeared for the first time in print in Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (1692).29 Mitchell considered that these pamphlets (dating from 1611 and 1617) were the rarest items in Lee’s collection. They included the first de Quir pamphlets published in England, and also in German. As far as Lee could learn while in Europe in late 1901, no copy was then to be found in the British Museum nor in Paris’ Bibliothèque National. Mitchell asked that these, together with Banks’ journal and Philip’s letters, be sent over to him immediately, wanting to peruse them himself. The rest of the collection could reach him at Lee’s convenience. To Bertram Stevens, they are the ‘crowning glory’ of Mitchell’s Australian collection, and pleased him ‘that they were at last added to his gift to the State’.30 Lee never disclosed the price Mitchell paid him. They had a clear understanding between them that neither would discuss the price paid. Lee kept his promise. His family estimated that the sum Mitchell paid for Lee’s collection of 828 volumes (including 677 books and 151 bound volumes of newspapers) was just over £5800.31 Mitchell handed over Lee’s collection to Bladen at the Library but kept the manuscripts he wanted to study.32

7.2 A ‘National Library’ from One Man’s Collection

Public appreciation of what Mitchell left became apparent by 1909, judging by Press reports. The Sydney Morning Herald considered that the great attraction of Mitchell’s Library was its ‘distinctively Australian nature’.33 This came from its

bissher in Mappis oder Landafflen Terra Australis incognita genannt) vnd desselben Lander, Reichtumb vnd Fruchtbarkeit u. vbergeben (Augsburg: Bey Chrysostomo Dabertzhofer, 1611). 29 Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue (Paris: Chez Claude Barbin, 1692) (DSM/910.43/F). 30 Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 583. Mitchell’s interest in these pamphlets reflect how his historical knowledge extended beyond historical curiosity then surrounding him which in Sydney was generally underpinned by nostalgia desire to recover lost aspects of ‘old Sydney’. 31 K. A. Johnson, ‘Lee, Alfred (1858-1923)’, ADB, Vol. 10, (1986), 45. 32 February 18, 1907, Bladen Minute for Trustees, ML90 1907/2(83). 33 ‘The Mitchell Library. A Priceless Bequest’, SMH, August 21, 1909, 5.

311 possessing ‘every work of note published in Australia from 1810 to 1900.’34 It remarked on the valuable manuscripts in the collection. The paper singled out the original journal of Sir Joseph Banks when he accompanied Captain Cook in his first voyage around the world (1768-1771). It also noted that bound in over 1000 volumes, were to be found thoughts of all the Australian explorers, the correspondence of the State’s Governors from 1866 to 1893, and thousands of letters. Comprehending the importance of Mitchell’s achievement relative to other collections might understandably have been difficult when most of the celebrated libraries of the world began as royal collections. Yet instances of spectacular private collections were not unfamiliar by the late nineteenth century. Several that were roughly contemporaneous with Mitchell’s collection provide a yardstick by which his can be measured. John Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, built a private library that has been described as a spectacular instance of a private collection developed through the second half of the nineteenth century.35 Just as Mitchell inherited family libraries (from his grandmother and his father) and built on these for his knowledge, Acton also inherited family libraries from both sides of his family and steadily added to these to build a library of 70,000 books for his own research purposes. Lord Acton was a trustee of the British Museum and a member of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and in 1886 he was one of the founders of the English Historical Review (which Mitchell read).36 His library (which was directed to European and ecclesiastical history from the Reformation) was a working tool. When Acton fell into financial difficulty, William Gladstone suggested that Andrew Carnegie buy Acton’s library. Carnegie allowed Acton to keep the library for his lifetime. After Acton's death, Carnegie gave it to British Liberal politician and writer John Morley, Viscount Morley (1838-1923), who gave it to Cambridge University Library where it is separately housed today. Acton’s Aldenham library was considered one of the largest private collections of its time, or indeed of

34 Press reports like this fed a generally held misconception that Mitchell indiscriminately collected everything published in Australia. See p.9. 35 David Pearson, ‘Private Libraries and the Collecting Instinct’ 2008, in Alistair Black, Peter Hoare (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Vol. 3, 1850-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181-182. 36 E. C. K. Gonner, ‘The Settlement of Australia’, English Historical Review, no. XII (Oct. 1888) (DSM/991/G).

312 any time. News of it going to Cambridge in 1902 was covered widely by Australian newspapers that year. Mitchell’s library could only have been equally as prominent being known as ‘the finest library in the Southern Hemisphere’.37 The Acton and Mitchell collections were similar in size and both were assembled for reference. However, differences between them are instructive. Acton’s library was primarily for his personal use whereas Jose asserts that Mitchell’s library served as a de facto public library from the 1870s, when J. D. Lang ‘disturbed the Public Librarian by demanding books that he could not supply’ [and] ‘was passed on to 17 Darlinghurst-road, and his need promptly satisfied’.38 Moreover, Mitchell’s collection is distinctive for its significant national overtone, with the Australiana component stemming from his patriotism. Jose emphasises that the pride that Mitchell took in his State determined him to collect and treasure material ‘that threw light on things Australian.’39 His library was intended to serve future Australian scholars. To Jose, Mitchell possessed ‘the patriot’s determination to make his private life one of high public usefulness’. Modern history was in the making at the closing of the nineteenth century when nationalism emphasised questions of national identity and authenticity. Past and future became caught up in national dreams and antiquities became symbolically valuable as new nations sought for their past. Foundation collections were built at the same time as Mitchell gave his collection. A year after the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth opened in 1872, a resolution was passed to establish a national library in conjunction with the University College.40 This led to the National Library of Wales, which opened thirty- nine years later.41 Patriotic Welshman Sir John Williams (1840–1926), Professor of Obstetrical Medicine at University College London before his retirement in 1893 and physician accoucheur to the Queen and Princess Beatrice, became the first President of the Library to which in 1909 he donated the Library’s core collection of over

37 Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 581. 38 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 467. Lang died in 1878. 39 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 467 40 On the establishment of national libraries see Humphreys, A National Library, 12-14. 41 By coincidence, the National Library of Wales was established by Royal Charter on the 19 March 1907 (on the day of Mitchell’s 71st birthday). The building was begun in 1911, and was first occupied in 1916.

313 25,000 books with a strong focus on Welsh interest.42 Williams was the library's principal founder and benefactor and, like Mitchell, Williams presented a priceless collection. It included vital collections of early Welsh poetry and prose, the earliest Welsh printed books, collectables like most of the publications of the Kelmscott Press, and invaluable records of Welsh life and culture in pictures, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Housed at Aberystwyth where Mungo MacCallum had been professor of English literature and history (1879-1886), Mitchell most likely knew of the moves taken to establish this library. Like Mitchell’s collection, the Williams collection focused on national entity as represented across many examples (including pictorial material and ephemera). However, Williams saw his collection housed as he intended, unlike Mitchell who endured a slow uptake to his lead for proper public library conditions. Mitchell (who had little desire for personal reward) never received accolades as went to Williams. For his work as a distinguished physician Williams received honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Wales, and the Sir John Williams chair of Welsh history was created to acknowledge him as an outstanding benefactor of the country.43 Mitchell on the other hand neither sought nor received recognition. For this reason Arthur Jose and Bertram Stevens both believed that Mitchell died as ‘the almost unknown man’.44 Jose wrote that Mitchell died knowing ‘the real value of his life’s work was in a fair way to be understood’ in the future.45 Few privately assembled collections existed that achieved Mitchell’s ambition of recording the history of a nation from its earliest record. The Gennadeion in Athens and the Turnbull Library in New Zealand perhaps provide comparison. A diplomat and bibliophile, Athenian-born Ioannis (Jean) Gennadios (1844-1932) set out to showcase the unbroken continuity of Greek culture and civilization from Antiquity to modern times. Gennadius spent forty years as Hellenic ambassador and minister to the court of St. James in London, during which he assembled the richest private collection of manuscripts, archives, books, and works of art about Greece. Gennadius developed a library of 26,000 volumes that opened to the public in 1926. Inspiring his collection

42 D. Jenkins, A Refuge in Peace and War: The National Library of Wales to 1952 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2002), 143–6. 43 R. Brinley Jones, ‘Williams, Sir John, baronet (1840–1926)’, ODNB, online edition (October 2007) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/95028 (accessed 21 Jan 2010). 44 Stevens, ‘The Mitchell Library’, 581. 45 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 468, 470. Evidence was given before the 1905 Public Works Committee.

314 was his conviction about the continuous genius of the Greek spirit from antiquity to modern times. His intentions were ‘to form a library that represents the creative genius of Greece at all periods, the influence of her arts and sciences upon the western world, and the impression created by her natural beauty upon the traveler.’46 His collection spanned the Greek classics but also Byzantine and modern Greek literature. A lover of Hellenism, his collection included historical treatises concerning Greece from the early to the modern times in all relevant languages. He first offered the collection to the Greek Government and then to the British School of Archaeology in Athens, but neither could afford to build the necessary accommodation. A grant of £55,000 from the Carnegie Institute enabled the American School of Classical Studies to open the library in a building of Naxian marble. Housed today on the slopes of Mount Lykabettus, his library was named Gennadeion in memory of his father, George Gennadius (1786-1854). A scholar and respected teacher, he was a patriot who was descended from Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and a leading fighter in the Greek War of Independence. The younger Gennadius was highly decorated including being made Britain’s honorary Greek Minister for life (an unprecedented honour) and receiving honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Princeton and Athens universities in recognition of his contributions to Greek scholarship. A parallel closer to Australia came from across the Tasman. Wellington-born merchant Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull (1868-1918) gave his collection of roughly 55,000 volumes and many maps, pictures, and manuscripts to the Crown in 1918. He expressed the hope that it would form ‘the nucleus of a New Zealand National Collection’. The first bequest of its kind in New Zealand, Turnbull’s collection is housed today within Wellington’s National Library building. Turnbull was a merchant’s son who followed into his father’s business. Books were his main delight, as they were for Mitchell. Both were interested in the history and ethnology of their native-born countries and their oceanic setting, as well as certain aspects of English literature and literary history. Both built comprehensive collections of early voyages related to the Pacific. Like Mitchell, Turnbull spent about £2,000 each year buying material. When the Turnbull Library was opened in 1920 its trustees agreed that it

46 ‘M. Gennadius, A Tribute by Mr. George Macmillan’, Times, September 13, 1932, 14; ‘Obituary: M. Gennadius Greek Diplomatist and Scholar’, Times, September 8, 1932, 12.

315 should be run on the lines of the Mitchell Library.47 Beyond Pacificiana, both collections were strong in the field of English literature. Turnbull’s interest in English literature took him to seventeenth-century poetical miscellanies and to developing a collection of Dryden. His Milton collection is ranked among the finest in the world. Biography and Scottish history was found in both collections. Mitchell had less interest in Aldine and Elsevir publications than Turnbull, and while Turnbull published Mitchell never did.48 Turnbull never met Mitchell though he wrote to Sydney collector William Dixson that, had he been able to examine Mitchell’s library, certainly ‘the only feelings I should have experienced would have been those of awe and admiration at the sight of the treasures he had been so assiduous in conserving for the benefit of his native country.’49 Earlier, when considering arrangements for the future of his collection, Turnbull took note of those Mitchell made for his. He wrote that Mitchell had made considerable personal sacrifice to do the work that should have been done by the New South Wales government.50 Bladen’s successor as principal librarian, William Ifould, was apprehensive that Turnbull’s wealth may have out-excelled Mitchell’s efforts. He found the Turnbull Library (or the National Collection as it became) offered no competition in acquiring original documents of Australasian

interest.51 To the end of his life, Mitchell was in full possession of an unclouded intellect. Stevens considered that Mitchell ‘was still very interested in the procession of life as it passed before his mind through the newspapers.’52 He worked with Rose on papers and photographs which he intended arranging.53 He placed orders for fresh material through Bladen during March and April, 1907. His last known order, though poignant, showed how consistent he was in his interests (in this case in theatre, harking back to his admiration for burlesque writer James Robinson Planché). His selection came from the 174th catalogue issued by the Holborn second hand bookseller

47 A. G. Bagnall, ‘A troubled childhood: The nucleus of a national collection’, Turnbull Library Record 3, no. 2, (1970): 92, 97, 101. 48 Alexander Turnbull, Account of a cruise in the yacht "Iorangi" to Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand (Wellington: Privately printed, 1902). 49 McCormick, Turnbull, 273. 50 McCormick, Turnbull, 273. 51 Ifould, March 20,1922, ML MS61/1/02. 52 Stevens, David Scott Mitchell, 14. 53 Scott to Bladen, August 30, 1907, ML 90 1907/14(341).

316 Mr. E. Menken. Mitchell ordered the item described as: ‘Royal binding; Original Prospectus of The Royal Dramatic College for Aged and Infirm Actors and Actresses, 1856. Special copy presented to Mrs Kean. 15s.6d.’54 The last known letter on file to him (so perhaps among the last he received) came from an anonymous writer in mid- May. This thanked him for allowing a portrait of his teacher, the Reverend Grylls, to be reproduced in a lantern slide for a lecture.55 Mitchell’s life was coming full-circle. Mitchell died four months later.56 A Government Gazette was issued in official appreciation of ‘one of the greatest benefactors this State has known of recent years, a large-hearted citizen to whose memory is due an everlasting debt of gratitude for the noble work he had undertaken in gathering together all available literature associated with Australia, and especially with New South Wales, and in making provision that the magnificent collection should for all time on his death become the property of the people of his native State.’57

7.3 Conclusion Given the public prominence that Mitchell received in his later years, it was taken that he was reclusive because at that time he rarely moved about. It was not appreciated that ill-health incapacitated and restricted him to his home. Ill-health forced the otherwise conspicuous Thomas Elder to spend his last years in seclusion.58 Poor health in Mitchell’s later years confined him; he was indeed ‘cabined’ as Anderson put it. This was because Mitchell suffered from pernicious anaemia (a low level of ref blood cells caused by the failure of the body to absorb vitamin B-12). Shortness of breath, fatigue, dizziness and pale skin can all occur with anaemia. When a young grand-niece first met him late in his life, she described how his skin was pale like parchment. Common to people with pernicious anaemia is vitiligo, a pigmentation disorder in which the cells that make pigment in the skin are destroyed. Embarrassment or concern about how others might react, along with impaired

54 Bladen receipt from Mitchell, March 5, 1907, Ml1, 913. This was Ellen Kean née Tree, also known as Mrs Charles Kean following her marriage in 1842 to the star actor Charles Kean (1811-1868). Also a star of the Victorian theatre, her career spanned forty-five years. The Keans toured Australia for nine months in 1863. 55 May 17, 1906, ML MSS1461/301. 56 On Mitchell’s ill-health see below. 57 ‘The Mitchell Library’, SMH, July 26, 1907, 4; GG, July 25, 1907. 58 Linn, Financiers, 103.

317 mobility, may have kept Mitchell house-bound. Vitamin B-12 deficiency affects the nervous system. The cause of his death was myalitis, a disease involving inflammation of the spinal cord which disrupts central nervous system functions. This could explain visitors finding him always seated in his chair as Bertram Stevens observed.59 The condition, if untreated, leads to a permanently damaged spinal cord. Mitchell distrusted doctors and refused to see any until Robert Scott Skirving was called in to tend to him in his final weeks. A self-acknowledged celebrity-hunter, Skirving had been angling to meet Mitchell whose frailty was advanced by then. In September 1906 Clara Manning, Emily Heron’s step-sister, hoped to see Mitchell when she presented him with bookplates of King George and Queen Mary. He was then in considerable pain, confined to his bedroom, unable to leave it. Yet his self- deprecatory charm rings clear in his reply to her. He wrote to her, ‘I feel as if I had come greatly to London and been given the Garter! Or something like that and it is all your doing. This is written in haste and is therefore much worse than my usual hand.’60 His hand is fluent, as if best-dressed and formal for the occasion of thanking her for the pleasure that her gift gave him. There is much to learn from Mitchell’s history. First, in the way that much detail can be ‘hidden’ or ‘lost’ in historical memory or its chronicles, so too detail about Mitchell’s life has been obscured. A sense of this has been felt for some time. In 1987 when writing about collecting books in nineteenth century Australia, Wallace Kirsop suspected that the narrative about Mitchell presented up to then ‘appears too simple and indeed it is’.61 This narrative saw Mitchell’s collection going into the State’s holdings through H. C. L. Anderson’s nurturing of Mitchell’s activities.62 Anderson did play his part in Mitchell’s story, but his role was less central than was stressed. Writing for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Gordon Richardson acknowledges that perhaps James Norton, Mitchell's solicitor and president of the library trustees, probably most influenced the disposition of his collection.63 Despite this the narrative that stresses Anderson’s role continued twenty years on when

59 Bertram Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’ 1919 MLC373, 3-4. Stevens observed that Rose Scott told him that movement was painful for Mitchell, who bore much pain uncomplainingly. Jose spoke of Mitchell’s endurance of pain: Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 470. 60 Mitchell to Manning, 4 September 1906, ML MSS 1461/305a. 61 Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books’, 80. 62 Biskup, Libraries, 45. 63 Richardson, ‘Mitchell, David Scott (1836–1907)’, ADB.

318 presented again during centennial focus on Mitchell.64 However, as Kirsop suggested that it might, deeper knowledge now gained of Mitchell’s biographical detail demonstrates that ‘History’ is much more nuanced and textured than it at first appears. Earlier accounts of Mitchell had only sketched his history. Escaping notice before was fuller knowledge of the primordial legacies – as Craig Calhoun defined immutable influences – such as Mitchell inherited from his family. Therefore, it has been essential to document these in this study. It is also important to outline information that had not previously been brought to light about Mitchell in terms of his circle.65 Biographical study of Mitchell is necessary because as Rose Scott wrote to George Robertson after Mitchell’s death ‘so few really knew anything about him, especially the last few years’.66 Ironically, it is from accounts of these years that Mitchell has largely been pictured. Consequently, accepted knowledge about Mitchell has been too thin; it was important to locate a more dynamic and textured truth than previously accepted – and which this study traces. With Mitchell’s background now more fully sketched, the deeper knowledge gained offers opportunity to investigate in greater depth the nature and degree of the interests that Mitchell held. This account touches on links between Cambridge and the University of Sydney and considers Mitchell’s ties to both. Connections that had not been appreciated before are considered, such as the connection that Mitchell had to the development of metropolitan Sydney, the changes that accompanied the city’s growth in population and size, and the establishment of facilities to support that growth. Social justice concerns went with this, on which Mitchell read widely. This account reflects on changes to philanthropy and the development of institutions, which Mitchell and his family were engaged with. This study shows that the depth of Mitchell's interests has never received the attention that it could. It indicates a number of connections and fields of interest that Mitchell held and which remain unexplored. These embrace a host of issues that call for investigation. In terms of his collecting, emphasis in this study has largely dwelled on Mitchell’s Australian focus because, while he remains Australia’s

64 Brunton and Ellis, Grand Obsession. 65 For further details beyond that illustrated in this study see Chanin, Book Life: in terms of how he collected see 176-182 and 183-188; on Mitchell’s circle of learning: 234-244. 66 Rose Scott to George Robertson, 26 July 1907, NLAMS3584

319 foremost library benefactor, the origin and context of his Australian collection was relatively unknown. Popular wisdom has it that he collected ‘everything’; this study shows that Mitchell was more selective than he has been given credit for – partly by circumstance as much as by choice. Mitchell’s focus and inclination can be discerned from his selectivity, by the judgement he shows from his choice of reading. This discursive study is merely an initial attempt to appreciate what his choice reveals. Previously little analysis had gone to Mitchell’s knowledge of non-Australian literature. Mitchell’s interest in literature of the Elizabethan Age dated from his family's establishment in England, the beginnings of Antiquarianism, and of British global expansion. As this study indicates, Orientalism is a feature of Mitchell’s global outlook owing to family links to the East India Company and to India and the Middle East. Oriental studies and manuscript collecting were part of this. Both aspects of early English literature and Orientalist literature in terms of his history and of his collection remain to be explored. Far from dismissing Mitchell’s legal interests (as has been the case until this research), law and legal history are threaded through Mitchell’s narrative, as are links between law and literature. His family's magistracy activity and legal links cemented Mitchell’s engagement with legal questions and reading of law. He kept his name on the New South Wales Roll of Barristers, Solicitors and Attorneys.67 Mitchell’s legal interests deserve more attention. His interest in the theatre and its ties with dissent is another unexplored aspect. The depth of his bibliographic ability calls for deeper analysis too. When writing about Mitchell in 1987 Wallace Kirsop pointed to Mitchell’s interest in Stendahl and Baudelaire, suggesting an adventurous literary taste: ‘He was far from being a quite conventional follower of old fashions’.68 Kirsop called then for focus on Mitchell’s non-Australian collecting which remains to be addressed. While Mitchell appears to be a research challenge having left few personal papers, the wealth of material that exists in his collection and in the papers of his contemporaries offers scope for further discovery.

67 Roll of Barristers, Solicitors, Attorneys, etc., 1824-76, State Records, New South Wales.; Hon. Mr Justice Waddy, ‘The New South Wales Bar 1824-1900: A Chronological Roll’, http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:hdsxv1aMvN4J:www.nswbar.asn.au/docs/about/history/c19thbarr isters.pdf+The+New+South+Wales+Bar+1824-1900&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari. Accessed 24 July 2010. 68 Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books’, 81.

320 Misreading can occur from scant documentation and Mitchell embodies the problems that can be associated with research when seemingly poor documentation exists. That Mitchell left few personal papers can be misread to support supposition that he was reclusive. Conventional accounts of his life attribute Mitchell to becoming a recluse following the Wolfskehl trial, shortly followed by the death of his mother in 1871. It is claimed that from then he only left his home to pursue his antiquarian interests. ‘Thereafter he ventured outside his Sydney house only to inspect books and manuscripts in pursuit of his antiquarian interests’, noted Rose Scott’s biographer.69 She supports this portrayal with Bertram Stevens remarking that he ‘heard D.S. Mitchell referred to as an eccentric and cynical old man’, and to Anderson’s portrayal of Mitchell having ‘no pleasures of anticipation, [and being] obsessed with only one hobby.’70 In making this assumption little account appears to have been taken of Victorian social norms. These were more formal, and so different to our own, that they can be difficult to appreciate. In the patriarchal society of the Victorian era, formal social protocol that was observed partly explains the distance that people maintained then. General etiquette called for self-restraint; being forward socially was untoward. Yet social correctitude and reserve that was expected by the Victorians does not make a recluse. Evidence outlined in this biographic account has shown that Mitchell was far more pro-social than the eremitical figure that ‘historical’ accounts of him have led us to believe.71 The term ‘recluse’ is a misleading description of Mitchell; it does not fit with Mitchell’s obvious social commitment. Misunderstanding about Mitchell can stem from other mis-readings. One of these is the issue of wealth. Late-century disparities in wealth were pronounced in Australia. Ostentatious display of wealth was de rigeur, as Melbourne-based bookmaker Joe Thompson demonstrated. Wealthy pastoralists like Thomas Elder liked and enjoyed the grand gesture: his home had its own botanic gardens, zoo and

69 Allen, Scott, 60. 70 Allen, Scott, 60 citing Stevens (although she has Mitchell visiting Rose Scott’s home: 99), ML A1830, 24, Anderson, ML A1830. 71 Wallace Kirsop, ‘The Richmond Recluse, of the Emigrant Bibliophile’ in Wallace Kirsop (ed.), Books for Colonial Readers – The Nineteenth-century Australian Experience (Melbourne: The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand in association with The Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, 1995), 17.

321 gas plant so that his estate would be ablaze with light at night.72 By association, assumptions were made about Mitchell’s wealth on the basis of his landholding. It was not appreciated that Mitchell’s capital was encumbered for some time after the Wolfskehl losses – as this study reveals – and then later was wholly turned to Mitchell’s self-directed ‘national’ pursuit. It should be noted that in the scale of things, alongside northern hemisphere comparisons, Mitchell’s bibliophilic activity was modest relative to contemporaneous (and exceedingly wealthier) Edwardian bibliophiles like Americans Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927) and J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913).73 It makes Mitchell’s achievement all the more remarkable that with a fraction of their resources he assembled a library of national importance. Mitchell lived without ostentation, in a manner that was distinct from the displays of the nouveau riche around him.74 He was a man of quiet manner and habits and lived in modest surroundings. He belonged to a cultured community in Sydney that generally did not participate in the showy pretensions of much of that city’s ‘society’. Hence he appears to be ‘hidden’. Because he did not feature in Sydney society does not mean that he did not hold company of his own. Jan Roberts observed when writing Maybanke Anderson’s biography that much of what when on in the circles that Maybanke Anderson mixed with was ‘hidden’.75 Intersecting with circles known to Mitchell, these numbered individuals who were prominently socially active in Sydney like Rose Scott. They counted those circles of society where material possessions counted less than worth and culture, as Melbourne’s Argus observed (in yet another retrospective account).76 It is Roberts’ view that hidden events do not rule out occurrence. Research into Mitchell’s life history has opened up investigation that proved to be of unexpected complexity. References detailed in the listed selected bibliography reflect this intricacy. In a way this texture reflects the mind of the

72 Linn, Financiers, 101. 73 Wallace Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books in Nineteenth-Century Australia: Individuals and Libraries’ in W. Boyd Rayward (ed.) Australian Library History in Context, Papers for the Third Forum on Australian Library History, University of New South Wales, 17 and 18 July 1987 (Sydney: University of New South Wales School of Librarianship, 1988), 78. 74 Mitchell detected and detested sham: see Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 468. 75 See chapter 3, 88-89; chapter 6, 205-206. 76 ‘Notes from Sydney’, Argus, 24 April, 1925, 14. This account followed Rose Scott’s death four days earlier.

322 Victorian for whom all knowledge was one’s province. Mitchell’s library catches the era’s hunger for information and search for answers to problems that resemble our own in the rush to progress. Mitchell’s library leaves us with a snapshot of both the Victorian Age and of his world and his view of it. Concerns then with pressing everyday issues and focus on advancement and the benefit to be gained from technological innovation dominated attention. By the late nineteenth century the pace of life was quickening, the social impact of science and innovation was being felt. The ‘hurried’ society of the late nineteenth century left few free to reflect on the period and its issues as Mitchell could. There is significant circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mitchell may have been a ‘man of influence’ to his contemporaries. Frequent instances in Mitchell’s history exist where circumstantial evidence suggests that his contemporaries may have consulted Mitchell about topical (even legal) issues. He possessed the intellect, inclination, interest, let alone the connections, the time, and would be discreet. William Windeyer’s inscription to Mitchell in 1895 shows that he was viewed with respect.77 Those in his circle who knew him did not view him as an oddity as he is generally remembered today.78 To Bertram Stevens, Mitchell seemed ‘remarkably consistent and anything but eccentric.’79 In portrayals of Mitchell little mention has been made of the attachment to Australia that Mitchell’s family held. They were not transient unlike many colonists, who regarded their time in Australia (where they prospered) as an interlude and who enjoyed their wealth in Britain. While they could not envisage the future, Mitchell’s family imagined the continent offered promise. They committed themselves to the opportunity for transformation that the colony represented. They believed in the future that Joseph Banks foresaw, whereby England ‘may revive in New South Wales’. In the course of their lives they helped to shape the prospect that Erasmus Darwin earlier in 1789 predicted for Sydney Cove where ‘ray’d from cities o’er the cultur’d land… …shall tall spires, and dome-capt towers ascent, And piers and quays their massy structures blend.

77 William Charles Windeyer, An Address Delivered Before the University Union by the Hon. Mr Justice Windeyer (Sydney: S. T. Leigh & Co., 1895) (DSM/042/P73). 78 Meacham, ‘The Book Collector’. 79 Stevens, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 52.

323 While with each breeze approaching vessels glide, And northern treasures dance on every tide!80

As this study makes clear, they remained committed to their new country: ‘the cultur’d land’ connected to the world at large. Nor in portrayals of Mitchell is little qualification given of their social and political position. Cosmopolitan and intellectual in their interest, middle-class in their social rank, family members led and were active in a variety of social and political settings in New South Wales and Victoria. Writing about the Anglican history of New South Wales, Patricia Curthoys highlights Mitchell’s uncle George Rusden in St Peter’s Church of England, East Maitland as example of the expansive view that men like him held about their place in colonial society and how they might contribute to it.81 She described Rusden as a member of the ‘clergy of the majority religion’, members of which ‘were usually gentlemen and saw themselves as part of the colonial gentry’. However, the expansive sense of ‘duty’ demonstrated by Rusden gives example of how members of Mitchell’s family viewed their social responsibility widely and typifies their inclusive outlook. Members held an expanded sense of public duty that was necessary to build community if the colony was to be cultivated and enlightened. A man like Rusden nurtured humanitarian values to influence community development, not to gain respectability (in the sense that Thomas Adam would suggest would underpin individual activity). Social climbing was of little need to members of the closely-knit Mitchell-Scott-Rusden-Merewether clan who by late- century belonged to ‘old society’ in Sydney. They comprised the pioneers, whom Robert Skirving acknowledged were ‘a kind of real Colonial Aristocracy’ of intellect and ability. It is perhaps not surprising that misreading of Mitchell occurred in light of Australian historiography on cultural elites (or the middle class as R. J. Morris more correctly calls their equivalents who were interested in reform in Britain).82 Such elites have been hard to place in Australian historiography. John Docker’s look at

80 Erasmus Darwin, ‘The visit of Hope to Sydney Cove near Botany Bay’ in Martin Langford, ed., Harbour City Poems, Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (Glebe, N.S.W.: Puncher & Wattman in association with Poets Union Inc., 2009), 18. The sentiment that Darwin expressed corresponds with the view that Sir Joseph Banks held about Sydney Cove. See Chanin, Book Life, 26. 81 Curthoys, ‘Churches’, 40. 82 Morris, ‘Civil society’.

324 intellectual traditions in Sydney and Melbourne written in 1974 stresses the diversities of traditions that ran through Australian culture. Docker addressed intellectuals from Christopher Brennan (who briefly catalogued part of Mitchell’s library of items that Mitchell gave to the Public Library in 1898) to Patrick White (who was often seen reading from material in the Mitchell Library).83 Albeit generally looking at individuals living into the 1960s, Docker wrote that writers ‘rejected Australia as an available cultural or social reality’.84 This view is the legacy of repeated observations made about cultural life in Sydney, which report that ‘with some few individual exceptions, the public of Sydney is not a reading public’ and ‘is far too practical to waste much time on general literature.’85 Evidence from Mitchell’s history suggests that an anti-intellectual view of Sydney is deep-seated. Reports about the lack of intellectual curiosity in Sydney are repeated by observers like Frank Fowler and ‘Orion’ Horne in the 1850s, and Daniel Deniehy and David Buchanan in the 1860s. In 1886 English historian J. A. Froude (who, when he visited Sydney, played whist with Mitchell) reported that ‘Sydney colonists’ lacked ‘severe intellectual interests.’86 Despite qualifying that Sydney shared this deficiency ‘with a large part of the civilized world’, he noted that Sydney colonists chased ‘enjoyment’; they strove ‘only to conquer the enemies of material comfort.’ In the same paragraph Froude describes the loneliness of the ‘rare’ intellectual in this ‘turbid atmosphere’ of Australia. He cites the example of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833- 1870), who ‘hungering after what Australia could not give him…had nothing to do but to shoot himself, of which he accordingly did’.87 Melancholy impressions like this conditioned views of Sydney’s intellectuals as possessing what Docker terms ‘a Sydney pessimism’. He wrote, that while Sydney’s philosophical tradition is rooted in free-thought and libertarian ideology, the basic assumption underlying Sydney thinking is that ‘social and political involvement is useless’.88 Yet as we have seen from Mitchell and his circle, their involvement was

83 Brennan was at the library from September 1895 and appointed second assistant librarian on 1 January 1907. 84 Whereas the Scott-Mitchells were quick to respect Australian prospects and realities (as the correspondence of Robert Scott shows): John Docker, Australian cultural elites: intellectual traditions in Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974), x. 85 Mrs. A. Macpherson (1860) in Groom & Wickman, Sydney, 68. 86 Jose, ‘Mitchell’, 467. 87 Froude, Oceana, 97. 88 Docker, Elites, ix.

325 socially minded and politically directed, while ‘Society’ around them met at gatherings ‘brought together by carpet balls, ice-creams and vanille’ (as Frank Fowler’s literary journal The Month described Sydney’s social life during the 1850s). Through the 1850s-1860s Mitchell’s family rebuilt to recover losses endured from overreaching during the decades before. They were set-back again with Wolfskehl’s greed challenging their ideals of a socially harmonious pluralistic community. Throughout the century they remained committed to nurturing the humanitarian values that were a mainstay of their family. In the context of late-century development of cultural institutions like public libraries, it has been argued that the strength, confidence and independence of middle class members like them needs to be emphasized.89 Understandably when material possessions contributed to forming social distinction, mythology grew around Mitchell.90 Mitchell announced his intentions in 1898. This set him apart from most because the 1890s were years when (as John Docker describes) ‘the long prosperity of the Victorian period deteriorated and collapsed into depression, extreme poverty and hardship –with the added phenomenon in Australia of severe extended drought’.91 It was a time of hardship and distress. Mitchell’s possessions, and that he could afford to give them away, put him into a ‘separate sphere’ and a class apart. His was an instance that varied in wealth, situation and function from most. Reading motivation requires caution, particularly when documentation appears to be spare. Mitchell left few personal letters and no diary. Yet his associations suggest that he would be unfairly dismissed as a mere book-collector and that he was indeed a philanthropist. Stressing his acquisitive urge alone incorrectly weights the scales against what until now had been his little-known family history. Theirs was a history of engagement with philanthropy and social ventures. Literature from this history, which Mitchell kept, as well as his own selection of similar literature which he read throughout his life, indicates that deep interest in Sydney’s future lay behind his purpose. From the items that he selected to read and preserve it

89 Black, English Public Library, 183. 90 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J H Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), 12. 91 John Docker, The Nervous Nineties, Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), xvii.

326 appears that he was motivated less by personal acquisition and more by deeply developed concern about the quality of life in Sydney and particularly that of its future. Nor should sight be lost of the fact that Mitchell’s library was built on earlier collections when he added to books belonging to his grandmother and his parents. His family cannot be disentangled from Mitchell’s history. Nor can Mitchell’s history be disentangled from the wider social and political history of the colony in the nineteenth century. Photographs were taken of Mitchell’s home just after his death. They show his work table as he left it. This is where he was sorting items with Rose Scott’s help not long before he died. Many of the items that he preserved were frequently linked to personal associations. This was understandable in light of the momentous events and notable individuals spanning the historical period through which he lived and with which he was familiar. Mitchell’s selection merely highlights his judgement and the context in which this selectivity was developed. The depth of Mitchell’s bibliographic interest and experience is evident from his choices. His library of bibliographical references shows the serious attention he gave to developing the bibliographic expertise that he possessed. Mitchell was not the hoarder that De Quincey was. Following his death in 1859, as many as four separate lodgings were discovered by his executors; each had been left behind by De Quincey when they became uninhabitable owing to the amount of papers and books that he gathered around him but was unable to arrange.92 Mitchell appreciated the emergence of systematic classification as a science, although no catalogue of his library beyond several notebooks of listed titles has been identified. Yet he clearly possessed a highly developed sophistication in the systematic description and classification of books and other written or printed works (let alone historical knowledge).93 Mitchell’s intellectual engagement in assembling publications discredited criticism of his library as ‘a sort of glorified lumber room, rubbish-heap, and waste- paper basket’ (as some spoke of it).94 Mitchell was intellectually engaged in the loftier sense of assembling publications as was described by the British Museum’s Keeper of

92 Irwin, English Library, 220. 93 Bertram Stevens acknowledged this specialization in terms of Australiana, which was dismissed by English critics like Andrew Lang: Stevens, The Mitchell Library, 583. 94 Bladen, Historical Notes, 85.

327 Printed Books, Richard Garnett. Classifying a great library was akin to the classification of human knowledge, Garnett said; it required familiarity with (and could become the symbol of) conflicting schools of thought.95 The Tasmanian material that Mitchell collected shows that he looked beyond conventional opinion. Frank Bladen, the editor of Historical Records of New South Wales, acknowledged that Mitchell was indisputably first among bibliographers.96 More, he emphasised that Mitchell was ‘at once the Leland and the Cotton of Australia’.97 Thus Bladen reveals that he, and therefore undoubtedly those within Mitchell’s circle who were working with him, were well aware of the historical position (and responsibility) that they occupied. Mitchell has been portrayed as the ultimate egotist. It has been written of him that he was self-seeking and self-gratifying, ‘not noted for generosity of spirit’, who ‘could scarcely be called a philanthropist’ and used most of his wealth to further his own ends.98 This portrayal reads Mitchell in terms of John Ruskin’s observation that social advancement in life meant conspicuous show, not of making money, but through being known to have made money by spending on culture. Reading Mitchell as an egoist alone sees his passion for books as no different to the acquisitive displays exhibited around him by prosperous colonists on their horses, villas, wine-cellars or other acquisitions. Reading Mitchell as largely self-centred and self-indulgent overlooks evidence from his background. Coming from a family and circle with a history of social activism, Mitchell appears far from guilty of the charge that Thomas Adam would lay at ‘gentlemen philanthropists’ chasing social standing. It ignores evidence from

95 Richard Garnett, Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London: George Allen, 1899), 211. (DSM/020/G). 96 F. M. Bladen, Historical Notes, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Government Printer, 1911), 52. 97 Bladen, Historical Notes, 85. Bladen refers to Leland’s Collectanea (with his accounts of British writers and catalogues of manuscripts in monastic libraries) and Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) who some argue assembled the most important collection of manuscripts collected in Britain by a private individual. Antiquary and poet John Leland (1503-1562) is acknowledged as being foundational to English local history and bibliography. On both men see, J. M. Levine, ‘Tudor antiquaries’, History Today 20 (1970): 278-85. For Leland’s significance see, Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530-1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); James Simpson, ‘Ageism: Leland, Bale, and the laborious start of English literary history, 1350-1550 in New Medieval Literatures eds. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:213- 36; Jennifer Summit, ‘Leland’s itinerary and the remains of the medieval past’ in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England eds. Gordon McMulland and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 159-78, 259-63. 98 Fletcher, Obsession, 35.

328 correspondence and his reading that shows that he held a developed social responsibility; it ignores Mitchell’s social core. Nor does it square with Mitchell’s apparent lack of conceit (he was known as ‘one of the most retiring and modest of men’). He refused to be drawn into focus on himself nor to lever advantage upon making his gift.99 Mitchell was a dedicated collector. His acquisitions were specifically targeted to ‘his master purpose’ (according to Professor MacCallum, who came to know Mitchell).100 Possession was his gratification because, as a letter from Rose Scott tells us, Mitchell’s ‘obsession’ (as she calls it) was purposeful.101 Far from accumulating his hoard for self-gratification alone, he systematically assembled at his work table the library (Wordsworth’s ‘hoards of truth’) which included a record of ‘the early history of his native land’ in which his family and many acquaintances played a part.102 Again, readings can not escape cultural norms. These were such that Lord Roseberry said of Britain’s most famous public library benefactor after Andrew Carnegie, John Passmore Edwards, that ‘wherever he goes a suspicion of benevolence dogs his steps’.103 Looking at ‘giving’ across both charity and philanthropy in history, Robert H. Bremner concludes that ‘giving’ resembles love and requires an element of both charity and philanthropy.104 He considers histories of charity and philanthropy that deal with what benevolent individuals and organizations have attempted to do, how they have proceeded and whether or not their efforts have proved effective. Literary sources that Bremner draws on that examine and comment on what writers and characters in their works have had to say about giving in general touch on altruism, self-interest and gentility. Bremner concludes that charity and philanthropy have never lacked critics. Both are accused ‘of serving the interests of donors rather

99 Bladen, Historical Notes, 90. This is how James Hogue described Mitchell when Hogue met him after Mitchell announced his gift in October 1898. Jose speaks of Mitchell ‘withdrawing his personality from notice’: Jose, ‘David Scott Mitchell’, 469. 100 Bladen, Historical Notes, 83. 101 Rose Scott, Letter to George Robertson, 26 July 1907, NLA MS 3584. 102 Bladen, Historical Record, 85. William Wordsworth ‘The Excursion, Book IV: Despondency Corrected’ in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Edward Moxon, 1836-7), 6:135. (DSM C642). According to Fred Wymark in 1933, this was the first book in Mitchell’s library, ‘given him by his mother.’ 103 Alistair Black, A New History of the English Public Library, Social and Intellectual Contexts 1850-1914 (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 314, note 188. 104 Robert H. Bremner, Giving: Charity and philanthropy in History (New Brunswick; London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), xi.

329 than those of recipients’ (as Lord Roseberry noted about John Passmore Edwards).105 In the Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes could not conceive of anyone practicing philanthropy except to enhance the esteem or ‘honour’ in which he was held in the community or to promote his own security and power. Joseph Fielding echoes this in his novel Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding asserts that in the spirit of Hobbes acquisitiveness is similar to charity. Behind both lies the ‘ambition to be respected more than other people’.106 This conviction continued through the nineteenth century. Mr Bulstrode, the banker in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871- 72), does not throw his money around but he uses his charity like his loans to increase his power in the community. He held positions of authority in all the public charities and his personal giving augmented the influence that he exercised. Notwithstanding this perception that egoism motivates giving, various positive translations for the word ‘philanthropy’ are more social than egotistical. These include ‘man-loving disposition, loving kindness, love of mankind, human charity, fostering mortal man, championing mankind, and helping men.’107 Even Hobbes defined philanthropy as ‘‘Desire’ of good to another, ‘benevolence’, ‘good will’, ‘charity’ if to men generally, ‘good-nature’.’108 Alexander Pope thought charity was the embodiment of ‘social love’ or concern for others which in the scheme of things balances self-love’ or concern for one’s own well-being.109 American political philosopher Michael Sandel writes that individuals are defined by the communities they inhabit. Identity is embedded in those communities ‘whether family or city, tribe or nation, party or cause’.110 Identities exist in terms of relational ties. They are ‘to some extent, emergent, the products of our social relations’ because individuals and traditions are ‘socially embedded’.111 Community

105 Bremner, Giving, xii. 106 Bremner, Giving, 61, 107. On Hobbes and ‘the benevolent principle’ see Isaac Disraeli, Quarrels of authors, or, Some memoirs for our literary history including specimens of controversy to the reign of Elizabeth (London: J. Murray, 1814), 3:66-69. (DSM/ 928.2/ D) 107 Bremner, Giving, Prologue. 108 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan. Rethinking the Western Tradition Series, edited by Ian Shapiro. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pt 1 ch. 6 cited by Bremner, Giving, 42. Mitchell owned a collection of works by Hobbes issued by Bohn in ten volumes (DSM/192.9/H). 109 Epistel lll, An Essay on Man (1733) on charity’s central pace in human affairs cited by Bremner, Giving, 71. 110 ‘Introduction’ in Michael Sandel, Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 5-6 cited by Derek L. Phillips, Looking Backward, A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 178. 111 Sandel, Liberalism, 180.

330 is marked by ‘a common vocabulary of discourse and a background of implicit practices and understandings.’ For the members of a genuine community he adds that ‘community’ describes ‘not only what they have as fellow citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.’112 This supports the intense connection that Michael Shaddy found American collectors between 1890 and 1903 held to the literature in their collections,113 and the intense connection that Susan Horowitz found cultural philanthropists held during the same period to their city of Chicago.114 MacCallum (who came to know Mitchell) emphasised that Mitchell was no misanthrope. He stressed Mitchell’s readiness to ‘further work that seemed in his eyes to be ministering to Australian culture.’115 Mitchell preserved the ideal of community that he inherited. MacCallum alluded to Mitchell’s patriotism being ‘fanned by the patriotic feeling for England he found among his Elizabethan favourites’. The past was common culture – heritage –- which could be shared, and could harmonize and widen the public domain. As Ruskin lectured, ‘No nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart…a nation cannot last as a money-making mob…concentrating its soul on Pence.’116 Bertram Stevens acknowledged that Mitchell’s motivation was his ‘genuine patriotism and belief that Australia would in the future be a great country’.117 Mitchell’s patriotic drive that underpinned his collecting was universally acknowledged in 1907 when the building housing his library opened. The Governor of the day, Lord Chelmsford, referred to Mitchell’s ‘farseeing patriotism’.118 James Hogue, returned to the portfolio of public instruction in Carruthers’ ministry and who met Mitchell in 1898, said ‘Only one who was a great philanthropist and at the same time imbued with the loftiest spirit of patriotism, could have conceived the idea of making to his native country a gift such as this – a library that will challenge comparison with any of the great libraries in the world.’

112 Phillips, Looking Backward, 11. 113 Shaddy, Books, 11. 114 Horowitz, Culture, 64, 68, 84. She examined the backgrounds of 34 business and professional men who were active in the cultural activity of Chicago. They wanted their city to be recognised as a cultural capital. 115 Bladen, Historical Notes, 85. 116 John Ruskin, ‘Lecture 1, Sesame, Of King’s Treasures’ in Sesame and Lilies, Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865) (DSM/824.86/R). 117 Stevens, The Mitchell Library, 582. 118 Bladen, Historical Notes, 89.

331 It may be clearer to appreciate Mitchell’s intentions in light of the difference that his contemporary John Passmore Edwards saw between ‘philanthropy’ and ‘duty’. Edwards elevated a ‘dutiful spirit’ above a ‘philanthropic spirit’. At the opening of the Whitechapel Public Library in London’s East End in 1892 (to which he gave £6000), Edwards expressed his desire to see in Britain ‘healthful, educated and prosperous citizens’.119 He was devoted to the public good for the benefit of the people. Individual gain was not his motive because he subscribed to the ‘beneficent mistress’ of ‘duty’ about which Edwards wrote: Her teachings and claims are prior to and mightier than the teachings and claims of philanthropy. Whilst a prevailing purpose of philanthropy is to mitigate human ills, a prevailing purpose of duty is to prevent them. There would be little necessity for the exercise of mercy or benevolence if right and justice ruled and regulated human affairs.120 Like he did with his selection in the Australasian Library Association’s conversazione in 1898, Mitchell perhaps left us a clue to his thoughts with his books by Richard Garnett and Edward Edwards (a classic example of self-help).121 In his Memoirs of Public Libraries, Edwards wrote that public libraries strengthened the faculty of independent thought and thus guarded against demagoguery.122 Both Garnett and Edwards believed that public libraries possessed a socio-political dynamic, being a means of increasing opportunity for self-education. Both men were socially engaged in their interest in spreading education. This focus is relevant to a revision of the traditional image of the detached collector. Edwards was concerned, as Richard Garnett pointed out in 1902, at the ‘waste of talent that lay sterile for lack of culture and opportunity’.123 For them, the public library should provide maximum accessibility because education was the birthright of all. The public library offered the potential for cultural uplift. Victorians like Edwards deplored the deficiency of culture in society and drew on both utilitarian perspectives (actively seeking an increased opportunity of access to learning) and

119 J. P. Edwards, A Few Footprints (London: Clements House, 1905), 51 quoted in Black, English Public Library, 314, note 182. 120 Edwards, Footprints, 39 cited by Black, English Public Library, 141. 121 Black, English Public Library, 90-100. Black calls Edwards a prophet of the public library movement, yet ‘forgotten even while he lived’. 122 Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, 2:936. 123 Black, English Public Library, 94.

332 idealist perspectives (initiated by Coleridge; and promoted by Carlyle, who mistrusted the era’s increasing specialization and espoused ‘learning in breadth’; and John Ruskin who mistrusted acquisitive society).124 As Mathew Arnold said, men of culture were the ‘true apostles of equality’.125 And Andrew Carnegie stipulated the duty of the man of means: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial result for the community – the man of wealth thus becoming ‘the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren...doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.’126 Mitchell’s passion for books and manuscripts could be likened to the insatiable passion for similar material held by Richard Heber. Mitchell resembled Heber whose acquisitiveness ‘was to a great extent justified by his remarkable learning and by his readiness to put his library at the disposal of scholars and students’.127 In his lifetime, Mitchell shared his library with those who sought it. Professor MacCallum stressed that Mitchell was ‘no mere bibliomaniac, no mere victim of the collector’s itch, but a bibliophile, a lover of books, a scholar in his own department.’128 MacCallum’s evidence gives insight into Mitchell’s unselfish nature. MacCallum found he was without books upon his arrival in Sydney in 1887 and was disappointed to find that the Public Library and the University library were ill- equipped. Mitchell came to MacCallum’s rescue.129 Without meeting MacCallum nor accepting his thanks, Mitchell offered him free access to his shelves and the loan of any volumes that MacCallum might want. They met eight years later when Rose Scott introduced them. Moreover, Mitchell followed the terms of Panizzi’s British Library.130

124 On this see Black, English Public Library, 125 Quoted in Black, English Public Library, 192. 126 Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth”, North American Review, 148 no.391 (June 1889), 653. 127 O’Dwyer, Dibdin, 20. 128 Bladen, Historical Notes, 84. 129 Bladen, Historical Notes, 84. MacCallum said this came about through a ‘common friend’. 130 Bladen, Historical Notes, 75.

333 Universal access was Panizzi’s view. He wanted everyone to have the same access: ‘a poor student is to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go’.131 Contending that ‘Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect’, Panizzi foresaw what would become expected practice by the early twentieth century. Mitchell’s foresight became clear when the opening of the Mitchell Library building prompted the State Premier’s Department to issue a directive banning the destruction of government records without the Principal Librarian vetting whether they may be required; archival material was deposited with the Public Library after 1911.132 It became the State’s de facto record office. Improvements in historical writing followed the opening of the Mitchell Library and the expansion of its collections.133 The impetus this gave to historical scholarship in New South Wales was ‘of enormous and far-reaching importance’.134 Additionally Mitchell’s example attracted other donations. Within a year of his death, Mitchell’s collection was enriched with two collections of pictures, theatrical memorabilia and illustrated journals, and a cache of manuscripts from Sir James Dowling (1787-1844).135 The most notable donation was the offer to the library in 1919 of mainly pictorial and manuscript Australiana material from the Sydney bibliophile (later Sir) William Dixson (1870-1952).136 In her letter to George Robertson, Rose Scott refers to Mitchell’s dedicated

131 Report from the Select Committee on the condition, management and affairs of the British Museum together with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index London House of Commons 6 August 1835 (also reproduced in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, Education, British Museum 2, Shannon, 1968), p. 391, paragraph 4, 794-5 cited by Humphreys, 9. 132 Fletcher, Passion, 2. D. J. Bluford, ‘New Foundation for the N. S. W. Archives’, Archives and Manuscripts 2, no. 2 (1961), 1. 133 Fletcher, Passion, 5. 134 Kirsop, ‘Collecting Books’, 81. 135 Bladen, Historical Notes, 85. Excited by Mitchell’s gift, John Plummer followed suit and was among the donors who gave to the Library after Mitchell’s death. Dowling’s papers were donated by his grandson James Dowling, who became a trustee of the Public Library in mid-1904. 136 The Dixson Library opened in 1929. Briefly outlining of the history, scope, and use of the Library is: Public Library of New South Wales, The Dixson Library (Sydney, N.S.W.: Public Library of New South Wales, 1967). For more detail see, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, The Dixson Library and Galleries, A Brief Guide, pref. H. V. Evatt (Sydney: V. C. N. Blight, Government Printer, 1959).

334 collecting as his ‘civilizing mission’.137 She stresses how Mitchell directed everything to the purpose of the library, at the expense of his own well-being. She reflects on his obstinacy, and his refusal to receive ‘any proper nursing or comfort’: ‘To think that like Emily Bronte whom he admired – he had endured and endured…whilst he spent hundreds on his mania.’ She alludes to the discrepancy between his reality and popular portrayal of him: ‘There is all the picture in the papers, and there is this picture, My God how terrible.’ Rose Scott calls Mitchell’s singularity of purpose ‘a human sacrifice’. Her opinion was that he sacrificed his own comfort for his singular purpose. This tells us how he was preoccupied with the ‘common good’ (an Englishman’s business that Hippolyte Taine spoke of). Mitchell’s dedication to the service of others, to ‘giving yourself’, fits Walter Besant’s definition of ‘New Philanthropy’ and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s ‘faith’ of the Victorian epoch.138 Service offered remove from Victorian materialism. Still, Mitchell’s ‘human sacrifice’ distressed his cousin: ‘Perhaps I’ll feel better about the Books, &c. by and by – but now I feel as if I hated them, and perhaps it has been better to write this to one who understands, for it haunts one.’ And to her, his passing marked an era – the era and its life that Mitchell preserved. This account of Mitchell’s life contextualises his activity and who he worked with. As outlined in chapter three, interest in cultural life was a feature of Mitchell’s ancestry as was reformism. Investigating new models for civil society and a progressive view of social responsibility ran in his veins. He worked during a foundational period when private benefactors like him developed and supported cultural institutions before government support for them became widespread (as is expected and is customary today). The object of this case study into cultural philanthropy was to put the uncontested leading fin-de-siècle benefactor David Scott Mitchell under the microscope and by investigating detail from his life and times to discover more about him and the culture of philanthropy as he knew it. Taking both a microscopic and telescopic view was required for this reading of cultural philanthropy. Mitchell himself believed that ‘the difficulty of the historian would be to balance the value of

137 Rose Scott to George Robertson, July 26, 1907, NLA MS 3584. 138 Himmelfarb, ‘Age’, 55.

335 men and things relative to the process of Australian development with their value as viewed from the world’s standpoint.’139 Ultimately this account surveys the philanthropic legacy that Mitchell inherited from his forebears, the understandings and practices of philanthropy in his circle, and the network of ideas concerning benefaction that he knew. This allows analysis of his altruism in its historical context in terms of preceding and contemporary benefaction. Furthermore, making clear how, what, and why a notable benefactor like Mitchell came to give fills out a picture of Australian generosity developed so far.

139 Stevens, Mitchell, 43.

336

Appendix 1. David Scott Mitchell, Public Benefaction 1898-1905

Date Details Amount

10/1898 Mitchell offered his collection to the New £30,000* South Wales government, valuing an estimated 30,000 volumes at £30,000, added to by £800 p.a.,* on condition that the government assures him that it erects a suitable national library in Sydney

11/1898-(6/1899) 1st donation: ‘Main Gift’ of 10,024 volumes + 50 pictorial items worth £6,000

Subsequent items handed over 1901-1907

2/1901 Mitchell’s will confirms his collection bequest £30,000 + £30,000 (Mitchell Library Endowment Fund)

10/1905 Mitchell donates £40,000 to create the Mitchell £40,000 Library

ESTIMATED TOTAL £100,000*

* Note that this is an estimated amount, and additions made frequently exceeded £800 p.a.

337

Appendix 2. ‘At the pinnacle of the collecting heirarchy’: Comparable Bibliophiles (Ker, Heber, Mitchell)

Collector Status Resided Collection Fate of library John Ker, 3rd Unmarried Floors Castle, Collecting from Sold in 1813 Duke of Kelso; c.1788 is poorly London & Roxburghe Friend of documented. Kelso, over (1740-1804) George lll St. James 30,000 volumes. £23341 Square, London Driven by his Bibliographical subject interests Society The rather than by Roxburghe Club rarity. Collected named after him Early English Literature and Scottish books. 15 Caxtons. Richard Heber Unmarried Hodnet, Collected from Sold between (1774-1833) Shropshire; c.1804. 1834-1837, Friend of Sir Collection England, Walter Scott Pimlico, housed in 8 or £56,774; 1835- London; more locations 1836, in Paris & Roxburghe Club in England and Ghent, £10,000. member Continental on the Continent 1717 Europe manuscripts to 127,500 to British Museum, 150,000 Bodleian volumes. Library. David Scott Unmarried Millers Point, Collecting from Offered to the Mitchell (1839- Sydney; c.1856 is poorly State of New Patron, 1907) documented. South Wales in Australian Darlinghurst, Driven by his 1898; Historical Sydney. subject interests Comprised the Society rather than by Mitchell Library rarity. Close to from 1910. 40,000 printed titles and nearly as many manuscripts. Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2005 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12854 (accessed 6 March 2011); Walker, 2001; Powell, 2001.

338 Appendix 3.

Selected Sources on David Scott Mitchell 1907-2007

Eyewitness SLNSW/Press Other

TRADE 1910-1940 Tyrrell 1936, 1952, 1957; Mitchell Library Press Spencer 1959 Wymark 1939 Cuttings; Leeson 1936 Gilbert 1986

1940-2010 Kirsop 1995 LIBRARIAN Richardson 1961, 1974; Jones, Fletcher 2007 Anderson 1920 1985; Robertson 1989; Ellis 2006; Larkin 2007; Brunton & Ellis 2007 FAMILY Cowen 1900; Scott 1923

OTHER Jose 1907; Stevens 1907

339

Appendix 4.

David Scott Mitchell: personal and institutional overlap

Date Details 1826 Australian Subscription Library, James Mitchell founding member. 1832-1853 James Mitchell committeeman of Australian Subscription Library. 1836 Birth of David Scott Mitchell. 1845 Australian Subscription Library housed in premises, Bent and Macquarie Streets, Sydney.

1856 James Mitchell Vice-President of Australian Subscription Library. 1866 James Mitchell President of Australian Subscription Library. 1869 New South Wales Government purchases Australian Library assets. Becomes the Free Public Library of New South Wales.

1895 Renamed the Public Library of New South Wales. 1898 Mitchell offered to bequeath his collection to the library trustees.

1899 Incorporation of the library trustees. 1906 Foundation stone laid for the Mitchell Wing. 1907 Death of David Scott Mitchell.

340 Appendix 5. Selected Conceptual Frameworks of Philanthropy (‘Giving Behaviour’)

Concept Source and Feature Reference Gift Exchange Cultural anthropology: Mauss, 1967. Reciprocal giving affirms relationships, builds solidarity. Calculated generosity; collectivist; pre-market society.

Social Exchange Historical: “Gifting implies Kidd, 1996; Ridley, 1998. relationships”. Reciprocity and Altruism.

Social Control Historians: Welfare dependency; Foucault, 1975/1977. social responsibility for the unprivileged/control by elites.

Moral Choice Historical: Benevolence. Prochaska, 1980, 1988, 1990; Harrison 1966, 1982.

Utilitarian Historical: Economic utility; Haskell, 1985. future oriented.

Individualist Social Historians: “no free gift”; Adam, 2004, 2009; (Market Societies) Egoism/“self-interested” Blau, 1986, 1996. individual; Status gaining tool.

Solidarity Sociologists, Psychologists: Payton & Moody, 2008. ProSocial Behaviour Attachment rather than status the source of basic life gratification.

341

Appendix 6.

Eras of Philanthropism spanning David Scott Mitchell’s history

Era Date Features of Philanthropic Practice 1: ‘New Philanthropy’ 18th to early 19th centuries Paternalistic, developed from ‘Age of Benevolence’ squirarchical approach that (Personal help) was altered by industrializing and urbanizing stresses. Humanitarian concern. Voluntary “giving of yourself”.

2: ‘Scientific Philanthropy’ Victorian Era Increasing specialism; concerns about efficiency; (Organized help) organizational support (Charity Organization Society, 1869).

3: ‘Wholesale Philanthropy’ Fin de siècle, from late 1880s “Joint-effort” principle ‘Age of Serial Philanthropy’ institutionalized. Foundations (Self-Help/corporate help) (Carnegie Corporation established 1911). Public/Private “joint” proprietorship established on principles of Self-help and dollar matching.

342 Appendix 7.

David Scott Mitchell (1836-1907): Phases of life

1st half: ‘Family years’ 2nd half: ‘Independent years’

6 Cumberland Street, Millers Point, Sydney 17 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, Sydney

(1) Infancy and boyhood (1836-1846) (1) Reading and acquiring (1873-1887)

(2) Youth and education (1846-1856) (2) Considering ‘public good’ (1887-1897)

(3) Early adulthood (1856-1873) (3)Ensuring the Mitchell Library(1897-1907)

343 Darnton

344 Appendix 9.

Population of Sydney 1851-1911

Year Population in Annual average Population as a thousands percentage increase, percentage of colonial by decades population 1851 54 _ 28 1861 96 5.9 27 1871 138 3.7 27 1881 225 5.0 30 1891 400 5.9 35 1901 496 2.2 37 1911 648 2.7 47 Source: J. W. McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’ in J. W. McCarty and C. B. Schedvin, eds., Australian Capital Cities, Historical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978), 21-2.

345 Appendix 10. Philanthropic foundation of selected voluntary associational organisations, social ventures and cultural repositories, Sydney 1813-1909

Date Details 1813 Benevolent Society (oldest still existing Australian founded third sector organization).

1816 Botanical Gardens established, Charles Frazer first Colonial Botanist.

1821 Philosophical Society of Australasia. Australia’s first learned society. (Disbanded end 1822). Aim to establish a colonial museum; 7 original members paying £5 to establish the collection and purchase books of reference. Established a collection of curiosities, housed in Colonial Secretary’s Office: the beginning of the Colonial Museum (later known as the Australian Museum). 1822 Parramatta Observatory.

1822 Royal Agricultural Society.

1826 Australian Subscription Library established. Opened in Pitt Street 1827. Attempts to combine with the Colonial Museum. Subscription Library incorporated in 1834. 1836 Subscription Library and Australian Museum housed in Bridge Street, 1840 in southern end of Macquarie Street. Institutions separated in 1841 but as late as 1874 a combined museum, library, sculpture gallery and public lecture theatre was proposed. 1846-1852 Museum premises, College Street, Sydney. 1855 Museum held its first exhibition. Opened to the Public in May 1857. 1846 Australian Medical Subscription Library.

1850 Australian Philosophical Society (became the Royal Society of New South Wales, 1866). 1860 Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney.

1861-1867 Museum builds West wing facing College Street; 1890-1 integration of original building with West wing. 1862 Entomological Society of New South Wales (to 1872).

1869 Australian Subscription Library assets transferred to New South Wales government. Becomes the Free Public Library of New South Wales. 1871 New South Wales Academy of Art, first ‘Conversazione’ or artistic soirée. 1880 (September) The Fine Arts Annexe, Sydney’s International Exhibition is officially opened as ‘The Art Gallery of New South Wales’. Name changed 1883 to ‘The National Art Gallery of New South Wales’; incorporated 1899. 1896-1909 Building erected in stages in Sydney’s Domain. 1874 Linnean Society of New South Wales (incorporated in 1884).

1877 Lending Branch of Free Public Library opens, Bent and Macquarie Streets (basement).

By 1886 Supreme Court Libraries in each capital city (Holgate).

1888 Macleay Museum, University of Sydney (1884 NSW House of Assembly voted £10,000 for construction of building required by the bequest of the Macleay Collection to the University). 1909 Lending Branch of Public Library transferred to Sydney Municipal Council. Becomes the Sydney Municipal Library (Australia’s first independent city library).

Source: Australian Subscription Library; Australian Library and Literary Institution; Dixson; Holgate; Kohlstedt; Moore; Sands; Strahan.

346

Appendix 11. Summary of Prominent Benefaction in Australia 1879-1893

Benefactor Dates Place of Birth Benefaction Value

Francis Ormond 1829–1889 Aberdeen 1881 Ormond Presbyterian £112,000 College and chair of music, Melbourne University. 1887 Working Mens College, Melbourne Sir Samuel 1832-1895 Ballycloughan, 1879 Wilson Hall, Melbourne Wilson County Antrim University Sir Walter 1803-1887 Pittenweem, Fife, Endowment of chairs at the £20,000 Watson Hughes University of Adelaide Sir Thomas 1818-1897 Kirkaldy, Fife Endowment of chairs at the £20,000 Elder University of Adelaide Robert Barr 1824-1915 Lochwinnoch, University of Adelaide £21,400 Smith Renfrewshire Thomas Walker 1804-1886 Leith, Edinburgh 1878-9 Nicol Stenhouse’s £100,000+ library of 4,000 books to the University of Sydney. Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital, Concord (opened 1893) Thomas Fisher 1820-1884 Sydney University of Sydney: to be £30,000 used to establish a library for the university (opened in 1909) John Henry 1806-1880 England 1889 University of Sydney £200,000 Challis Sir Peter Nicol 1816-1905 Kirkaldy, Fife 1895 University of Sydney, to £50,000 Russell teach engineering Dr. George 1803-1893 Plymouth 1890 University of Sydney, £3,000 Bennett Book donations to the library. Sir William 1829-1891 Wick, Caithness Gave his collection to the £23,000 Macleay University of Sydney estimated value Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography; Barff, 1902; Bright, 1895; Challis, 1880; Fletcher, 1929; Linn, 1988; Macdonald, 1941; Menz, 2006; Radford, 2000; Radic, 1996; Ross, 1912; Russell, 1964; Stacey and Hay, 2007; Stanbury and Holland, 1988; University of Melbourne, 1879; Woodburn, 1983; Young et. al, 1984.

347 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. PRIMARY SOURCES

1.1 Manuscript Sources (and printed transcripts)

MITCHELL LIBRARY, SYDNEY Armstrong, R. A. Correspondence to Parkes May 7, 1886. MLA919.

Anderson, H.C.L. Unpublished Manuscript. ML A1830.

Astley, William. Papers. ML MSS250.

Bathurst Federation League. Records, 1896. ML MSS1163.

Eldridge Papers, ML MSS6318.

Farrell, John. Papers ML MSS 1522/1

Hendy-Pooley, Grace. Papers. ML MS1261/1. Jevons, William Stanley. ‘Remarks upon the Social Map of Sydney, 1858’ (1854- 1859). ML B864.

Lee Family. Papers, 1729-1972. ML MSS2903/18.

Manning, William Montagu, Sir. Sir William Montagu Manning Papers, 1829-1892, with papers of his family, 1791-1832. ML MSS246.

Manning, William Montagu, Sir. Correspondence 1831-1887, together with associated Manning family papers, 1820-1917. ML MSS4392.

‘Minerl’ (Minnie Lee). Unpublished Manuscript, 1889. ML MSS2903/1.

Mitchell, David Scott. Catalogues and indexes to books held, Catalogue of Pickering Publications in the Library of David Scott Mitchell, 5 December 1877, ML C371.

Mitchell, David Scott. Last Will and Testament, February 14, 1901, ML MSQ026.994/6.

Mitchell, David Scott. Papers. ML PXA1037.

Mitchell Family. Papers. ML MSS 379/Box 4.

Mitchell, James. Legal papers, ML MSS 379/Box3X.

Mitchell, James. Papers. ML A2026.

348 Mitchell, James. ‘List of books’, in David Scott Mitchell Catalogue and indexes to books held c.1839-1877. MLC374.

Mitchell, James. Papers, being mainly correspondence received c.1824-1869, Mitchell’s Tram Road Act July 24, 1851. ML A2026.

Parkes, Sir Henry. Correspondence. ML A872; A876.

Scott, Augusta Maria. Scrap Album of Prints and Drawings c.1815-1855. ML PXA2040

Scott Family. Papers (1790-1924) together with papers of the Rusden family (1834- 1898), Vol. 4, 11/1820. ML MSS A2263.

Scott Family. Papers, Vol.7, Dr. Helenus Scott, Medical and Scientific Papers 1780- 1820. ML MSS 38/2X.

Scott Family. Papers, Vol. 8, Robert Scott, Legal and Financial Papers, 1821-1843. ML MSS A2267.

Scott Family (Rose Scott). Papers (1777-1925). ML MSS382X-6X.

Scott, Rose. International Women’s Suffrage Correspondence (1847-1925), Part 1, Scott Family Papers c.1790-1924 with Papers of the Rusden Family 1834- 1898. ML MSSA2260-2284.

Scott, Robert. Correspondence. ML MSS A2263.

Scott, Rose. Address Book and Notebooks. ML MSS38/22WL.

Scott-Skirving, Robert. ‘Memoirs’. ML 571/56.

‘Selected Tasmanian Papers, 1821-1877’, Mitchell Library, bequeathed by David Scott Mitchell, 87 volumes from a series of 368 volumes; ‘Tasmania Supreme Court, Death Warrants and related papers 1818-1884’, ML C202-3,

Stenhouse and Hardy. Papers ML *D 80-*D 81. Stephen, Sir Alfred. Papers, Correspondence 1874-1890. ML MS211/3.

Stevens, Bertram. Papers, 1919-1920. MLMSS 3213.

Stevens, Bertram. David Scott Mitchell 1919 with an article on the Mitchell Library by Bernard Stevens extracted from The Lone Hand 1 October 1901. ML C373.

Stevens, Bertram. ‘Memoir concerning John Farrell’ in How He Died and Other Poems (1905 edition). ML A821.

349 Windeyer, Mary Elizabeth Windeyer. Holograph letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, ML AW77/15.

Wymark, Fred. Reminiscences of David Scott Mitchell, 1939. MLAm 121/1/1-3.

LAKE MACQUARIE CITY LIBRARY Dulcie Hartley Collection. LONDON City of London Corporation, Guildhall.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, CANBERRA Papers of Sir Joseph Banks 1745-1820, NLA MS9. Petherick, Edward Augustus. Papers 1756-1917. NLA MS760. Hughes, Walter Watson. Will 1885-1886. NLA MS 2746. Scott, Rose. Letter to George Robertson, 26 July 1907. NLA MS 3584.

NEWCASTLE CITY LIBRARY ARCHIVES Merewether Estate Archives A1A.

Merewether, Edward. Private Correspondence.

ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VICTORIA, MELBOURNE Rusden, G. W. Personal and Historical Papers. MS 13280, 17501-14, 22228-35.

St. JOHNS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Adams, John Couch. Papers.

STATE LIBRARY, VICTORIA Rusden and Spence Families. Papers, 1824-1928. SLV MS 9699.

STATE RECORDS, NEW SOUTH WALES SRO Insolvency Index.

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES Windeyer, William Charles. Sydney University Archives P1/10/20.

TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Rusden, George William. Papers.

1.2 Photographic Archives and Pictorial Material Cumberland Place, Residence of Dr. James Mitchell, c.1865. MLSPF/388. Dalton, Edwin. Glass stereograph photographs of Sydney, 1859. ML ON235.

Ironside, Adelaide. Sketchbook c.1850s. ML PXA1759.

350 Jevons, W. S. Photographs 1858. ML M1195.

Manning Family. Pictorial material, c.1857-1900. ML PXA 1223

Merewether, Edward. Watercolour, attributed to W. Nicholas, c.1841. ML P2/342. Merewether, E. J. comp. ‘The Ridge’, Merewether, near Newcastle, NSW. ML PXA902/15-19. Merewether Family. ML Pic.Acc.1029.

Mitchell, David Scott. Album of drawings and ephemera, c.1868-1892. MLL379/Box 4 No.1.

Mitchell, David Scott. Selection of photographs of his residence at 17 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst N.S.W., ML SV1/ResMit/1,6,7-V1/Res/Mit/ 1a, 6b, 7a, 9a.

Mitchell, James. Album of photographs of family and friends, ca. 1863-1892 (possibly compiled David Scott Mitchell), ML PXC 831.

Mitchell, Dr James ca. 1855-1865, portrait photograph, ML MIN 360.

Mort Family. Pictorial material, ca. 1857-1910. ML PXD 993.

Murray, Captain John, R.N (discoverer of Port Phillip), ca. 1804, oil on canvas, attributed to Hubner. ML22.

Nicholas, William. Rev. J. C. Grylls, First Clergyman in Victoria, 1852, ML P2/237.

Royal Australian Historical Society. Photographs of individuals 1865-1916. ML Pic.Acc.2039/Box 9.

1.3 CONTEMPORARY PUBLISHED SOURCES

1.3.i. Official publications and state papers House of Commons. North Australia, Return of All Expenses Incurred for the Settlement of North Australia. London: Queen’s Printers, 1848.

House of Commons. Report from the Select Committee on the Condition, Management and Affairs of the British Museum Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, London House of Commons 6 August 1835. In Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, Education, British Museum 2, Shannon, 1968.

Legislative Assembly. New South Wales. Remodelling of the “The rocks” resumed area. Sydney: Government Printer, 1901.

351 _____, Report from the Select Committee on Working of the Free Public Library, Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. Sydney: Government Printer, 1900.

_____, Third Report of the Royal Commission on Public Charities. Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1899.

_____, Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Make a Diligent and Full Inquiry into and Report upon the Methods of Carrying on Government Charitable Institutions (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1898.

_____,Votes and Proceedings, 1859-60, vol. lV Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis, Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis, together with the proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1860.

New South Wales Library and Art Gallery Act. An Act to Incorporate the Trustees of the Public Library and National Art Gallery Respectively to Provide for the Endowment and Management of Those Institutions. Sydney: Government Printer, 1900.

New South Wales, Royal Commission on Public Charities: Second Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Working and Management of the Public Charities of the Colony. Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1874.

New South Wales, Royal Commission on Public Charities (Sydney Infirmary), First Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Working and Management of the Public Charities of the Colony. Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1873.

Public Library of New South Wales Report of Trustees for the Year 1899, Legislative Assembly, NSW, Tabled March 14, 1900.

1.3.ii. Select newspapers and periodicals Advertiser, The Antipodean, The Argus Artist, The, Australian, The Brisbane Courier Burlington Magazine Calendar of the University of Sydney Canberra Times, The Clarion Call

352 Cosmos Magazine Daily Southern Cross Empire Flotsam and Jetsam Geographical Journal, The Hobart Courier Illustrated Sydney Herald Illustrated Sydney News Labour History Library, The Lone Hand, The Maitland Mercury Sydney Gazette Sydney Morning Herald MBC Monthly Review The Monitor, Times, The London

1.3.iii. Books and Pamphlets A Catalogue of Books in the Circulating Library of William M Garvie, Australian Stationary Warehouse, George Street, Sydney. Sydney: Mansfield, 1829.

Ackermann, Rudolph. The History of the Colleges of Winchester, Eton and Westminster: with the Charterhouse, the Schools of St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors, Harrow and Rugby, and the Free-school of Christ's Hospital. London: R. Ackermann, 1816.

Anderson, Henry C. L. Guide to the Loan Exhibition of Old and Rare Books, Manuscripts, Engravings, and Historical Relics Held in the Great Hall, Sydney University, October 4th, 1898. Sydney: Hennessey, Campbell & Co., 1898.

_____, comp., Guide to the system of cataloguing of the Reference Library, with Regulations for Visitors, Hints to Readers and Students, Rules for Cataloguing and Subject Headings Used in the Dictionary Index. Sydney: Government Printer, Sydney, 1898.

_____, comp., Guide to the Catalogues of the Reference Library with Regulations and Guide to the System of Cataloguing (Sydney: Government Printer, 1896.

_____, ‘Report to Trustees on an inspection of libraries in England, Europe and the US during long service leave in 1903’ in Public Library of New South Wales, Report from the Trustees for 1904. Sydney: Government Printer, 1905.

353 Armstrong, Edmund La Touche. The Book of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria: 1856-1906. Melbourne: Printed for the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria, 1906.

Astley, William. Tales of the Isle of Death (Norfolk Island). Melbourne: George Robertson, 1898.

Australasian Bibliography from the ‘Daily Telegraph’ 1893. Sydney: Daily Telegraph, 1893.

Australasian League. The Inauguration of the Australasian League: held at the Queen’s Theatre, Melbourne, on February 1st, 1851. Melbourne: S. Goode, c.1851.

_____, The League Tracts. Hobart: Australasian League, 1851. Australian Agricultural Company. Australian Agricultural Company Annual Report no.32. London: The Company, 1856.

Australian Library and Literary Institution. Annual report of the committee of management to the proprietors and shareholders at the general meeting held at the library. Sydney, N.S.W.: Australian Library and Literary Institution, 1868. Australian Medical Subscription Library. Catalogue of the Australian Medical Subscription Library, Established in 1846 with Rules and Regulations. Sydney: The Library, 1855.

Australian Subscription Library. At a general meeting of subscribers of the Australian Subscription Library and Reading Room, held at the Sydney Hotel on the 26th of February 1826, J. Mackaness Esq in the Chair, the following gentlemen were nominated the original members of the Institution... Sydney: Robert Howe, Government Printer, 1826.

Author unknown. ‘An Eldorado in our Midst, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States’, The Cosmos Magazine (February 28, 1895): 339.

_____, In Memoriam: Sir William Macleay Born at Caithness, A. B. June 13th, 1820. Died at Sydney NSW December 7, 1891. Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1891.

_____, (probable author Charles Tomlinson). Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society: A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel. London: John W. Parker, 1844.

_____, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham Compiled Chiefly from his Correspondence Preserved in Her Majesty's State-paper Office Including Notices of Many of his Contemporaries. London: R. Jennings, 1839.

354 _____, ‘Brigadier-General Alexander Walker of the Bombay Army’, in The Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1832. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832.

_____, Proceedings of a General Court Martial, Ordered by Governor Macquarie, to Try the Rev. Benjamin Vale, for Seizing an American Vessel Trading in Sydney Cove. London: Printed by Joyce Gold and published by J. Asperne, 1817.

_____, The Trial of John McArthur, Esq., Before a Court of Criminal Judicature, Assembled at Sydney, in New South Wales, on February the 2nd, 1808, and Four Following Days. London: Printed by Wood & Innes, 1808.

Badham, Charles. Speeches and Lectures Delivered in Australia. Sydney: W. Dymock, 1890. Baker's Sydney Circulation Library. Juvenile Library: Catalogue; Rules and Regulations to be Observed at Baker's Juvenile Library and Baker's Sydney Circulation Library. Sydney: Hibernian Printing Office, 1842.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of the Pacific States of North America. San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft,1882-1890.

Barff, H. E. A Short Historical Account of the University of Sydney, in Connection with the Jubilee Celebrations 1852-1902. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1902.

Beattie, John Watt, comp., Port Arthur and Tasman Peninsula illustrating the convict days of Tasmania. Hobart: Mercury Office, 1905.

_____, Glimpses of the Lives and Times of the Early Tasmanian Governors, Being Lectures Delivered in Hobart During the Centenary Celebrations in February, 1904. Hobart: Davies Bros., 1905.

_____, Members of the Parliaments of Tasmania. Hobart: J. W. Beattie, 1895.

_____, Governors of Tasmania, from 1804 to 1896. Hobart: J. W. Beattie, 1895.

_____, Port Arthur Past & Present. Melbourne: Rae Bros., 1891.

Bennett, Samuel The History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation. Sydney: Hanson and Bennett, 1867.

Bigge, John Thomas & Great Britain Parliament House of Commons. Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales Together with a Report from the Select Committee on the Conduct of General Darling with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, 1822-1835. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968.

Bladen, Frank Murcott. Historical Notes, Commemorative of the Building of the Mitchell Wing. Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales, 1906.

355

_____, Historical Notes, The Origin and Development of the Public Library of New South Wales, 2nd ed. Sydney: Government Printer, 1911.

_____, The Growth of the Australasian Colonies and their Present Relation to the Mother Country. Sydney: J. L. Holmes & Co, Printer, 1886.

Bland, W. R. N. Services Rendered to New South Wales. 4th Ed. Sydney: O’Connor, Printer, 1867. Bonwick, James. An Octogenarian's Reminiscences. London: Nichols, 1902.

_____, The Writing of Colonial History: extracts from the ‘Home News’, 29 March, 1895 and the ‘British Australasian’, 4th April, 1895. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1895.

_____, Early Struggles of the Australian Press. London: Gordon & Gotch, 1890.

Bowdler, Thomas. The Family Shakspeare, in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818.

Brabourne Papers, The. Relating to the Settlement and Early History of the Colony Purchased from Lord Brabourne by Sir Saul Samuel, Agent-General), a Pamphlet Containing a Summary of the Contents of These Important Papers. 2nd ed. Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1897.

_____, Relating to the Settlement and Early History of the Colony Purchased from Lord Brabourne by Sir Saul Samuel, Agent-General), aPamphlet Containing a Summary of the Contents of These Important Papers. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1886.

Bradley & Newton. Important Sale of Books: the Valuable Library of the Late D.H. Deniehy, Esq., Consisting of Rare and Choice Works in Every Department of Literature to be Sold by Public Auction by Bradley & Newton at their Rooms, Old Bank of Australasia, 239 George Street on Thursday & Friday July 26 and 27. Sydney: Bradley & Newton, c.1865.

Brennan, Martin. Reminiscences of the Gold Fields, and Elsewhere in New South Wales, Covering a Period of Forty-Eight Years’ Service as an Officer of the Police. Sydney: William Brooks, 1907.

Bright, Mrs Charles. ‘The Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital’, The Cosmos Magazine 2, no. 2 (October 1895): 45-53.

Brooks, S. W. Charity and Philanthropy. a prize essay (historical, statistical and general), on the institutions in Sydney which aim at the diminution of vice, or the alleviation of misery, and are supported wholly, or in part, by the gifts of

356 the charitable. Sydney: W. B. Campbell, 1878. Sydney: F. Cunninghame and Co., General Steam Printers.

Buchanan, David. Political portraits of Some of the Members of the Parliament of New South Wales. Sydney: Davies and Co., 1863.

Burges, Sir James Bland. The Birth and Triumph of Love, A Poem. London: Printed for the Proprietor by T. Bensley, sold by R. Jennings and P.W. Tomkins, 1823.

Burney, Fanny. Cecilia, or, Memoirs of an Heiress. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820.

Burney, Frances. Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady's Introduction to the World. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820.

Campbell, Thomas. Life of Petrarch. London: Henry Colburn, 1841.

Carlile, Richard, ed., The Republican. London: R. Carlile, Printer, 1819.

Carnegie, Andrew. The Gospel of Wealth and other timely essays. London: Warne, 1901.

_____, ‘Wealth’, North American Review 148, no. 391 (June, 1889): 658-661.

_____, Round the World. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879.

Carruthers, J. H. Captain James Cook, R.N., One Hundred and Fifty Years After. London: Murray, 1930.

Catalogue of a choice portion of the library of the late Dr. Geo Bennett, Sydney. Sydney: Websdale, Shoosmith & Co., 1893-1900.

Census of the Colony of New South Wales taken on the 7th April 1861, under the Act, 24 Victoria, No. 5. Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1862.

Challis, John Henry. Will of the late John Henry Challis. Sydney: Printed by Gibbs, Shallard, 1880.

Charity Organization and Relief Society. The. Eleventh Annual Report. Sydney: Gibbs, Shallard & Co., 1889.

_____, Twenty-first Annual Report. Sydney: The Society, 1899.

Charity Organization of Melbourne. Proceedings of the Second Australasian Conference on Charity, held in Melbourne, from 17th to 21st November, 1891, convened by the Charity Organization Society of Melbourne. Melbourne: R.S. Brain, Government Printer, 1892.

357 Chisholm, Caroline. The ABC of Colonization. London: John Ollivier, 1850.

City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen. Annual report of the City Night Refuge and Soup Kitchen. Sydney: Lee & Ross, 1879 through 1894.

Clarke, Marcus. The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume. Compiled and edited by Hamilton Mackinnon. Melbourne: Cameron, Laing, 1884.

_____, The Future Australian Race. Melbourne: A. H. Massina & Co., 1877.

_____, Old Tales of a Young Country. Melbourne: Mason, Firth & McCutcheon, 1871.

Cole, G. W. Account of the Proceedings of the First Australasian Library Conference held at Melbourne on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th April, 1896 Together with the Papers Read, List of Delegates, etc., and the Constitution and Office Bearers of the Library Association of Australasia. An index to Bibliographical Papers Published by the Bibliographical Society and the Library Association, London: 1877-1932. Melbourne: Government Printer, 1896.

Coleridge, S.T. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge. London: W. Pickering, 1836-9. _____, ‘A Lay Sermon’, In Complete Works (London: 1853).

_____, Biographia Literaria. London: Rest Fenner, 1817.

Commercial Reading Rooms and Library (Sydney, N.S.W.). The Rules and Regulations of the Commercial Reading Rooms and Library. Sydney: Printed by Kemp and Fairfax, 1842.

Cormack, Semple. ‘The Hospitals of London, no. VI’, London Journal of Medicine 3, no.30 (June1851):575-583.

Council of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch. Handbook of Instructions for the Guidance of the Officers of the Elder Scientific Exploration Expedition to the Unknown Portions of Australia. Adelaide: The Branch, 1891.

Cunningham, Peter. Two Years in New South Wales: A Series of Letters comprising Sketches of the Actual State of Society in that Colony, of its Peculiar Advantages to Emigrants, of its Topography, Natural History &c. London: Henry Colburn, 1827.

de Foigny, Gabriel. La Terre Australe connue. Paris: Chez Claude Barbin, 1692.

De Lissa, Alfred. Production, Distribution and Quesnay’s Tableau économique. Sydney: McCaron Stewart & Co, 1896.

358 _____, Companies’ Work and Mining Law in New South Wales and Victoria, A Treatise for the Guidance of Solicitors, Directors, Investors and Others. London: George Robertson, 1894.

_____, The Labour Problem. Sydney: W. E. Smith, 1891.

_____, Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law: Proposal of a New System and of Theories for More Comprehensive Legislation for the Protection of Property and Control of Credit Operations, with Remarks on Mr. Chamberlain's Bill. Sydney: George Robertson, 1881.

Deniehy, Daniel Henry. How I Became Attorney-General of New Barataria: An Experiment in Treating Facts in the Forms of Fiction. Sydney: Edward Greville, 1860.

de Queirós, Pedro Fernandes. Terra Australis incognita, or, A new southerne discouerie, containing a fifth part of the worl: lately found out by Ferdinand de Quir, a Spanish capitaine neuer before published. London: Printed for Iohn Hodgetts, 1617. _____, Relation Herrn Petri Fernandes de Quir, Spanischen Hauptmans u. So er Konig. May. in Spanien u. Von dem new erfundnem vierten theil der Welt (so bissher in Mappis oder Landafflen Terra Australis incognita genannt) vnd desselben Lander, Reichtumb vnd Fruchtbarkeit u. vbergeben. Augsburg: Bey Chrysostomo Dabertzhofer, 1611. Des Houssayes, Jean Baptiste Cotton. The Duties & Qualifications of a Librarian: A Discourse Pronounced in the General Assembly of the Sorbonne, December 23, 1780. Chicago: McClurg, 1906.

Devens, Richard Miller. Our First Century, Being a Popular Descriptive Portraiture of the One Hundred Great and Memorable Events of Perpetual Interest in the History of our Country, Political, Military, Mechanical, Social, Scientific and Commercial, Embracing Also Delineations of All the Great Historic Characters Celebrated in the Annals of the Republic, Men of Heroism, Statesmanship, Genius, Oratory, Adventure and Philanthropy. Guelph, Ont.; Sydney: J.W. Lyon, 1878.

Dibdin, Charles. Great News, or, a Trip to the Antipodes. London: C. Dibdin, 1794- 1795.

Dibdin, Thomas Frognall. Bibliophobia, Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade in a Letter Addressed to the Author of Bibliomania by Mercurius Rusticus. London: Henry Bohn, 1832.

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. London: Chapman and Hall, 1865.

Disraeli, Isaac. Quarrels of authors, or, Some memoirs for our literary history including specimens of controversy to the reign of Elizabeth (London: J. Murray, 1814).

359

Dobson, Mrs. The Life of Petrarch: Collected from Memoires pour la Vie de Petrarch. 5th ed. London: Printed by T. Maiden for Vernor and Hood, 1803.

Dodwell, E., and J. S. Miles, comp. & ed., Alphabetical List of the Ffficers of the Indian Army: with the Dates of their Respective Promotion, Retirement, Resignation, or Death, whether in India or in Europe, from the Year 1760 to the year 1834 Inclusive, Corrected to September 30, 1837. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, 1838.

Drake, Samuel Adams, ed., Our World’s Great Benefactors Offering Short Biographies of the Men and Women Most Eminent in Philanthropy, Patriotism, Art, Literature, Discovery, Science and Invention. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884.

Drummond, Sir William. Origines; or, Remarks on the Origin of Several Empires, States, and Cities. London: Printed by A. J. Valpy, 1824-1829. Duncan, William Augustine. Notes of a Ten Year Residence in New South Wales, Extract from Hogg’s Instructor, 129-150.

Edwards, Edward. Lives of the Founders of the British Museum. London: Trübner, 1870.

_____, Free Town libraries, Their Formation, Management and History in Britain, France, Germany and America Together with Brief Notices of Book- collectors, and of the Respective Places of Deposit of Their Surviving Collections. London: Trübner & Co., 1869.

_____, Libraries and Founders of Libraries. London: Trübner, 1864.

_____, Memoirs of Libraries, including Handbook of Library Economy. London: Trübner & Co., 1859.

Edwards, John Passmore. A Few Footprints. London: Clements House, 1905.

Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition. Journal of the Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition, 1891-1892 Under the Command of D. Lindsay. Adelaide: C. E. Bristow, 1893.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edinburgh: Williams Blackwood, 1874. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature: Addresses, & Lectures. Boston: James Monroe, 1849.

_____, Essays. Preface by Thomas Carlyle. London: James Fraser, 1841.

Farrell, John. How he died, and other poems. London: Angus and Robertson, 1913.

_____, My Sundowner, and Other Poems. Edited with Memoir and Notes by Bertram

360 Stevens. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1904.

_____, An Iliad of Albury & other poems (1878-1883). Edited, introd. by Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jane Downing. Albury, NSW: Letao Publishing, 2002.

Favenc, Ernest. The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888, Compiled from State Documents and the Most Authentic Sources of Information, Issued under the Auspices of the Governments. Sydney: Turner & Henderson, 1888.

Fitzpatrick, J. C. L. The Good Old Days: Being a Record of Facts and Reminiscences Compiled from the Columns of the “Windsor Richmond Gazette”. Sydney: William Dymock, 1900.

Flanagan, Roderick. The History of New South Wales, With an Account of Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania), New Zealand, Port Phillip (Victoria), Moreton Bay, and Other Australasian settlements, Comprising a Complete View of the Progress and Prospects of Gold Mining in Australia, the Whole Compiled from Official and Other Authentic & Original Sources. London: Sampson, Low, 1862.

Fletcher, J. .J., ed., The Macleay Memorial Volume. Sydney: Linnean Society of New South Wales, 1893.

Fletcher, William Y. English Book Collectors. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1902.

_____, Public Libraries in America. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1894.

Foscolo, Ugo. Essays on Petrarch. London: John Murray, 1823.

Fourier, Charles. The Passions of the Human Soul, and their Influence on Society and Civilization. Translated and Introduction by Hugh Doherty. London: Baillière, 1851.

Fowler, Frank. Southern Lights and Shadows, being Brief Notes of Three Years’ Experience of Social, Literary and Political Life in Australia. London: Sampson Low, 1859.

Free Public Library of New South Wales. Australasian Bibliography (in Three Parts), Catalogue of Books in the Free Public Library, Sydney, Relating to, or Published in Australasia 1869-1888. Sydney: Government Printer, 1893.

_____, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Free Public Library, Sydney, for the Years 1877 and 1878, Reference Department. Sydney: Government Printer, 1880.

Free Public Library (Sydney, N.S.W.). Catalogue of the Free Public Library, Sydney, 1876, Reference Department. Sydney: Government Printer, 1878.

361

_____, Supplementary Catalogue of the Public Library of New South Wales, Sydney, for the years 1896-1900. Sydney: Government Printer, 1902.

Free Public Library (Sydney, N.S.W.) Lending Branch. Catalogue of the Lending Branch of the Free Public Library, Sydney, for 1880. Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881.

_____, Supplementary Catalogue of the Lending Branch, January 1899 to June 1900. Sydney: William Brooks, 1901.

Froude, J. A. Oceana, Travellers’ Tales of Early Australia & New Zealand, the tempestuous voyage of J. A. Froude, 1884 & 1885. Edited by Geoffrey Blainey. North Ryde, N.S.W.: Methuen Haynes, 1985.

_____, Oceana, or England and her colonies. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1886.

Garnett, Richard. Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography. London: George Allen, 1899.

George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth and the Remedy. London: William Reeves, 1879.

Giles, Ernest. The Journal of a Forgotten Expedition. Adelaide: W. K. Thomas & Co., 1880.

_____, E. Giles's explorations, 1875-6, Proceedings of the Hon. Thos. Elder's Expedition under the Command of Ernest Giles, from Perth to Adelaide. Adelaide: Government Printer, 1877.

_____, ‘Journal of exploration from South to Western Australia in 1875’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1876).

Gonner, E. C. K. ‘The Settlement of Australia,’ English Historical Review lll, no.12 (1888): 625.

Grote, George. History of Greece. London: John Murray, 1854-1857. _____, ‘Institutions of Ancient Greece’, Westminster Review (April 10, 1826): 260- 331. Grote, Mrs. The Personal Life of George Grote. London: John Murray, 1873.

Hallam, Henry. The Constitutional History of England, from the accession of Henry V11 to the death of George 11, 6th ed. London: J. Murray, 1850. Hannay, James. ‘Bohemians and bohemianism’, Cornhill Magazine, 11 (1865): 241– 55.

362 _____, Sketches in Ultramarine. London & New York: George Routledge & Co., 1854. _____, Satire and Satirists: six lectures. London: David Bogue, 1854.

Hay, Sir Andrew Leith. A Narrative of the Peninsular War 3rd ed. London: John Hearne, 1839.

Hendy-Pooley, Grace. Index to the Sydney Gazette 1803-1842. Sydney: G. Hendy- Pooley, 1916.

_____, Index to the Sydney Gazette 1803-1825 (Inclusive). Sydney: G. Hendy-Pooley, 1913.

Heron, Emily (‘Australie’). The balance of pain and other poems. London: George Bell and Sons, 1877.

Herschel, Sir J. F. W. et. al. Papers relating to the University of Sydney and to the University College, Sydney, New South Wales: Printed at the Desire of Sir J. F. W. Herschel, Bart., G.B. Airy, Professor Malden and H. Denison. London: Printed by Richard Taylor, 1851.

Hill, Constance. Frederic Hill: An Autobiography of Fifty Years in Times of Reform. London: R. Bentley and Son, 1893.

Hill, Octavia. Homes of the London Poor 2nd ed. London: Macmillan and Co., 1883.

Hill, Rosamund and Florence Hill, What We Saw in Australia. London: Macmillan and Co., 1875.

Hingston, James. The Australian Abroad on Branches from the Main Routes around the World. Melbourne: William Inglis and Co., 1879.

Hittell, John S. The commerce and industries of the Pacific coast of North America. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882.

Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan Rethinking the Western Tradition Series, edited by Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Holden, George Kenyon. An Enquiry into the New Relations Between Labour and Capital Induced by Co-operative Societies, Labour Partnerships and Other Forms of Productive Industry in which Labour is Employed on a Footing More Independent than Common Hire with some Reference to Special Features of Colonial Industry. Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1867.

_____, The Moral and Intellectual Culture of the People, Essential to Secure the Advantage of High Wages and Political Privileges: A Lecture. Sydney: Printed at the ‘Empire’ Office, 1853.

363 Holgate, C. W. An account of the chief libraries of Australia and Tasmania. London : C. Whittingham, Chiswick Press, 1886. Holyoake, George Jacob. Self-help by the People: History of Co-operation in Rochdale. London: Holyoake & Co., 1858.

Horne, R. H. Australian Facts and Prospects: to which is Prefixed the Author’s Australian Autobiography. London: Smith, Elder, 1859. _____, The Dreamer and the Worker, A Story of the Present Time. London: Henry Colburn, 1851. Howard Association. Howard Association Report. London: Howard Association, 1891.

_____, Howard Association Report. London: Howard Association, 1875.

Industrial Blind Institution, To Sir Alfred Stephen: President of the Institution from its Foundation in Commemoration of the 90th Anniversary of his Birthday from the Committees of the Industrial Blind Institution, Sydney 20 August 1892. Sydney: Blind Institution, 1892.

Ingersoll, Robert Green. The Three Philanthropists. Melbourne: E W Cole, 1890.

In Memoriam: Sir William Macleay born at Caithness, A. B. June 13th, 1820. Died at Sydney NSW December 7, 1891. Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1891.

Irving, Joseph. The book of Scotsmen eminent for achievements in arms and arts, church and state, law, legislation, and literature, commerce, science, travel and philanthropy. Paisley: A. Gardner, 1881.

King, P. G. Comments on Cook’s Log (H. M. S. Endeavour, 1770) with Extracts, Charts and Sketches. Sydney: George Stephen Chapman, Acting Government Printer, 1891.

_____, Memoranda about early history of New South Wales (Sydney:1878).

Kipling, Rudyard. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses. Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1886.

_____, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses 3rd ed. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co, 1886.

Laughton, Rev. James B. A Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the Bathurst Mechanics; School of Arts. Sydney: Printed by F. Cunninghame, 1855.

Lawson, James R. Pty. Ltd. Important Sale by Auction, Without Reserve, at Lawson & Smith’s Auction Rooms, 128-132 Pitt Street (near King Street) under Instructions from Messrs. Angus & Robertson, the Duplicate Copies of Rare Books Recently Purchased from Public Library of New South Wales…Sydney: Websdale, Shoosmith & Co., Printers, 1897.

364

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Old German Puppet Play of Doctor Faust, Turned into English. Translated by T. C. H. Hedderwick. London: K. Paul, Trench & Co., 1887. _____, The Dramatic Works of G. E. Lessing. Edited and Translated by Helen Zimmern. London: George Bell and Sons, 1878. _____, Laocoon. Edited and Translated by Sir Robert Phillimore. London: Macmillan and Co., 1874.

Lewis, George R. Scotland a half-educated nation. Glasgow: 1834.

Lhotsky, John. On Cases of Death by Starvation, and Extreme Distress among the Humbler Classes Considered as One of the Main Symptoms of the Present Disorganization of Society with a Preparatory Plan for Remedying These Evils in the Metropolis and Other Large Cities. Introduction by Viscount Ranelagh. London: J. Ollivier, 1844.

Library Association of Australasia. Proceedings of the Sydney Meeting, October, 1898, with Three Appendices. Sydney: Hennessey, Harper & Co, 1899.

Mackintosh, Sir James The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851.

Macalister, J Y W. ed., with Leopold Delisle, Melvil Dewey, Carl Dziatzko, Richard Garnett, The Library A Quarterly Review of Bibliography and Library Lore, New Series. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1904.

Madan, Falconer. A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, vol. IV. Collections received during the first half of the 19th century, nos. 166-. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1897.

Mahon, Lord (Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope). History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713-1783. London: J. Murray, 1836-54. Martin, E. A. The life and speeches of Daniel Henry Deniehy. Melbourne: George Robertson, 1884.

Maurice, Frederick Denison. Has the Church of the State the Power to Educate the Nation? A Course of Lectures. London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1839.

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor: the Condition and Earning of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work. London: Griffin, 1866.

Merewether, F. L. S. University of Sydney Reminiscences. Printed for private distribution 1898.

365 Merewether, Henry Alworth. By Sea and Land, Being a Trip through Egypt, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, and America, All Around the World. London: Macmillan and Co., 1874.

_____, and Archibald John Stephens. The History of the Boroughs and Municipal Corporations of the United Kingdom from the Earliest to the Present Time. London: Stevens and Sons, 1835.

Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism. 4th ed. London: Longman, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1871.

Millar, J. A Discourse on the Duty of Physicians. London: 1776.

Miller, John. The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel. Sydney: Edwards, Dunlop & Co., 1892.

M.I.S.T., Annine: A Novel. London: T. Cautley Newby, 1871.

Money, Agnes L. comp., History of the Girls’ Freindly Society. London: Wells, Gardner & Darton Co., 1911.

Montague, C. J.Sixty years in waifdom; or, The ragged school movement in English History. Introduction by Katherine F. Lenroot. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1904/1970.

Moore. J. Moore’s Almanac and Hand book for New South Wales. Sydney: J. Moore, 1857.

_____, Moore’s Almanac and Hand book for New South Wales. Sydney: J. Moore, 1854.

_____, Moore’s Almanac and Hand Book for New South Wales. Sydney: J. Moore, 1852.

Morley, John. Studies in Literature. London; New York: Macmillan, 1891.

_____, Critical Miscellanies, First Series. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.

Morris, Edward Ellis, ed. Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia London: Cassell, 1887- 89.

_____, Imperial Federation, A Lecture. Melbourne: Victorian Review, 1885.

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_____, ‘The Armytage Collection: Taste in Melbourne in the late Nineteenth Century.’ In Studies in Australian Art, edited by Ann Galbally and Margaret Plant. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Department of Fine Arts, 1978).

Ventress, Alan. ‘A tale of tension and neglects: state archives in New South Wales 1788-1960.’ The Australian Library Journal 56 (November 2007): 430.

Wach, Howard M. ‘Unitarian Philanthropy and Cultural Hegemony in Comparative Perspective: Manchester and Boston, 1827-1848.’ Journal of Social History 26, no. 3 (1993): 539.

Walker, David. ‘Studying the Neighbours, The Asian Collections.’ In Remarkable Occurances, The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years 1901-2001. Edited by Peter Cochrane. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001.

Walker, R. B., ‘Funds across the Sea: Philanthropic assistance from Australia to the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century.’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 68, no. 2 (1982): 111.

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422 Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’ In The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Edited by Elizabeth Webby. Oakleigh, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715-1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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2.2 Unpublished Dissertations

424 Bridges, Barry John. ‘Aspects of the career of Alexander Berry, 1781-1873.’ Phd diss., University of Wollongong, 1992.

Brudney, Ben. ‘Gentleman Bankers, The Self-Perception of the Financial Elite in the City of London, 1792-1848.’ Senior thesis diss. History Department, Columbia University 2009.

Burns, R. J. ‘Secondary Education and Social Change in New South Wales and Queensland Before 1914.’ PhD. diss., University of Sydney, 1965.

Clark, Harry. ‘The Production, publication and sale of the works of Hubert Hower Bancroft.’ Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1969.

Clemente, Caroline. ‘The Private face of Patronage: the Howitts, Artistic and Intellectual Philanthropists in early Melbourne Society.’ M.A. diss., University of Melbourne, 2005.

Duplain, R. C. ‘Elites in the colony and state of Victoria 1860-1939: a prosopographical analysis.’ Ph.D. diss., Deakin University, 1994.

Ginn, Geoff. ‘Gifts of Culture, Centres of Light, Cultural Philanthropy in the Late- Victorian East End.’ PhD. Diss. University of Queensland 2001.

Godden, Judith. ‘Philanthropy and the woman's sphere, Sydney, 1870-circa 1900.’ PhD diss., Macquarie University, 1983.

Hayes, Sarah. ‘Being middle class, an archaeology of gentility in nineteenth-century Australia.’ Ph.D. diss., La Trobe University, 2008.

Hoare, Michael E. ‘Science and scientific associations in eastern Australia, 1820- 1890.’ PhD diss., Australian National University, 1974.

Kociumbas, Jan. ‘Children and Society in New South Wales and Victoria 1860- 1914.’ PhD diss., University of Sydney, 1983.

Lemon, Barbara. ‘In her gift: activism and altruism in Australian women’s philanthropy 1880-2005.’PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2008.

Levett, John. ‘The Tasmanian Public Library 1849-1869 the rise and fall of a colonial institution.’ M. Lib. diss., Monash University, 1984.

Menninger, Margaret. ‘Art and Civic Patronage in Leipzig, 1848-1914.’ PhD diss., Harvard University, 1988.

Murray, Chris. ‘The ragged school movement in New South Wales, 1860-1924.’ (M. A. diss, Macquarie University, 1979.

Nelson, Jack R. ‘H. C. L. Anderson, Principal Librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales 1893-1906: His Achievements and Significance.’ PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 1991.

425

_____, ‘Cataloguing theory and practice in Australian libraries in the nineteenth century with particular emphasis on New South Wales.’ M. Lib. diss., University of New South Wales, 1979.

Pitts, Judith Elizabeth. Science and Public Museums: Some Nineteenth Century Conections. B.A. (Hons.) diss, Griffith University, 1990.

Ritter, Leonora. ‘William and Mary Windeyer in Colonial New South Wales: Simultaneous Bearers of Two Traditions.’ PhD diss., University of Sydney, 1995.

Shiell, Annette. ‘Fundraising, flirtation and fancywork: charity bazaars in nineteenth- century Australia.’ Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 2009.

Schweinsberg, Valerie Ann. ‘The State Library of Queensland: its origins, personalities and reasons for its late development.’ Master of Letters diss., University of New England, 1995.

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Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Literature and the Reading Public in Australia, 1800-1850: A Study of the Growth and Differentiation of a Colonial Literary Culture during the Earlier Nineteenth Century.’ PhD diss, University of Sydney, 1974.

Wright, Christine A. ‘Really respectable settlers’: Peninsular War veterans in the Australian colonies, 1820s and 1830s.’ Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 2005.

Zillmer, Leslee A. ‘Charity and Class in Victorian Literature and Art.’ Ph.D. diss. Pennsylvania State University, 1999.

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