For one of the world’s great cities, London was relatively late in establishing a great public library.
The initial collection of books from which the library grew came from Sir Hans Sloane (b. 1660, d. 1752), a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. He had amassed a large collection covering many fields, listed in 46 catalogues. On his death he wished the collection to be offered to the Crown for a sum of £20 000.
After accepting this offer, in 1753, an Act of Parliament established a body of trustees led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons who were tasked to find a suitable “repository” for the collection and act as its governing body. The same Act authorized a lottery to raise money to pay for Sloane’s collection in addition to the Harleian manuscripts which were then up for sale.
The trustees declined an offer of Buckingham House (now Buckingham Palace) for £30 000, but settled to purchase Montagu House in Great Russell Street, and to repair and refit it to house the collection at a total cost of under £25 000.
Statutes were drawn up in 1758, the collection was arranged in 14 lower rooms of the main block, and on 15th January, 1759, the British Museum as it was then called was opened to “studious and curious persons” who were admitted at a rate of 10 per hour.
One very important additional donation was made to the Sloane collection prior to the museum’s opening. In 1757, King George II transferred to its care the Library of the Kings and Queens of England, now called the Old Royal Library, an extensive collection gathered by successive Kings of England from around the time of Edward IV.
The museum library absorbed further collections over the ensuing decades. In 1799, one of the collection’s trustees, Rev. C. M. Cracherode, bequeathed to the museum his collection of 4500 volumes. This collection included some fine examples of early printing.
In 1823, the museum’s collection doubled in size when King George IV offered to the Government a vast collection amassed by his father, which totalled 65 000 books and 19 000 pamphlets.
Ongoing acquisitions made space a pressing problem. In 1815, Sir Robert Smirke was appointed as architect to the museum. Smirke proposed to construct a new building in the neoclassical style of four wings enclosing a quadrangle. A wing to the northeast corner of Montagu House to house the “King’s Library” was completed in 1826.
The Domed Reading Room at the British Museum
Further expansion was undertaken in the middle of the 19th century as the library’s collection grew rapidly. In 1852, work commenced on the famous domed Reading Room and the surrounding ‘Iron Library‘ to the designs of Sydney Smirke (Sir Robert‘s brother.) It was erected in the central quadrangle and opened in May 1857. The collection of close to a million books was held in revolutionary space-saving arrangements that surrounded the central reading room; such a design was thereafter adopted by many other great libraries abroad.
For more than a century, beneath the great dome of the Reading Room (larger in diameter than St. Paul‘s and St. Peter‘s), scholars and writers worked and pored over the library’s increasing stock. To name but a few: Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Carlyle and Virginia Woolf. As did a young man under the name of Jacob Richter, the name used by Vladimir Lenin on his reader‘s pass.
By 1867, separate departments were established for maps and Oriental manuscripts, and in 1881, the museum’s natural history collection was relocated to South Kensington as part of the new Natural History Museum.
Another landmark in the history of the library occurred in 1879: the printing of the General Catalogue, which had previous been maintained as manuscript.
By the end of the century, the library again seemed to be growing beyond its space as a rapidly growing newspaper archive competed with books for shelf space. A site in Colindale was purchased and a repository for newspapers was built. In 1906, the newspaper archive was relocated to these new premises.
The problem of space remains as a consequence of the endless intake of books, periodicals, music and other materials under the Copyright Act. The Act of Parliament of 1911 established the library as one of six permitted to receive a free copy of every item published in the United Kingdom by ‘legal deposit‘.
The remarkable growth of the museum library over 200 hundred years was checked only temporarily by the destruction of Second World War air raids. The library lost about 150 00 books from its Bloomsbury site, and some 30 000 newspapers were reduced to ash at the newspaper archives in Colindale as a result of World War II bombing raids.
In 1973, the library was fully disengaged from the British Museum with the passing of the British Library Act. Following unsuccessful plans to build larger premises in Bloomsbury, a derelict goods yard between Euston and St. Pancras stations was chosen as the site of a new building.
HM The Queen opened the British Library in June 1998.