1753–1800

It may be a measure of the relative importance of the British Museum that histories of London in the Hanoverian period make little mention of it, and none at all of its library. It is absent from M. Dorothy George’s London life in the eighteenth century. George Rudé mentions Montagu House – ‘merged with the British Museum in 1755’ – among aristocratic houses, and Hans Sloane, whose collection of antiquities ‘became the nucleus of that in the British Museum’. Francis Sheppard has three brief passing references to the museum, two among plans for the development of London’s infrastructure and one among the expansion of cultural institutions. Paul Langford’s main concern is the neglect of the museum by George III in favour of the Royal Academy. And Peter Ackroyd’s London: the biography refers only to the ‘building stone’. Works devoted to library history are not particularly forthcoming either. Paul Kaufman’s Libraries and their users, albeit focused mainly on provincial libraries, contains not even a passing mention of the British Museum library. And P. R. Harris’s magisterial History of the British Museum library devotes only some twenty-six pages (of a text of 686) to the period 1753 to 1798.

This neglect is due to a certain extent to the infrastructure of London in the mid-eighteenth century. Great Russell Street ‘marked for all practical purposes the northern boundary of urban Bloomsbury’. Montagu House, the first of many buildings to house the museum and library, was ‘outside’ (as it were), one of a number of stately, if not princely, houses (John Evelyn called the original ‘Mr Montagues new Palace neere Bloomesbery’), which ‘some, like the aristocracy, sought [for] occasional or prolonged escape … to the neighbouring countryside’, as did an increasing number of Londoners seeking to avoid the unwholesome and unhealthy urban environment.