“A National Library for Canada”: The J.D. Barnett Collection

Abstract

“A National Library for Canada”: The J.D. Barnett Collection Ian Rae (bio) This article will examine the development of John Davis Barnett’s private collection of over forty-two-thousand books, which Barnett had hoped to make the foundation of a National Library of Canada but which ultimately became the Arts Library at Western University in London, Ontario.1 Barnett, a resident of Stratford, Ontario, possessed “the greatest private library in the Dominion” at the time of his widely publicized donation to Western in 1918, according to the Ontario Library Review (“Honorary” 4). To give some idea of the scale of Barnett’s collection, the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, when it opened in 1876, contained approximately forty-seven-thousand volumes (“Inside”) out of the 79,486 collected by the governments of Upper and Lower Canada over the previous eight decades (Todd 1).2 Barnett, in the space of sixty years between [End Page 75] his arrival in Canada as a teenager from England in 1866 and his death in 1926, amassed approximately forty-two-thousand volumes in diverse areas of specialization, including early Canadian and American literatures, engineering, religion, Canadian and American history, and Shakespeare studies. Barnett negotiated with federal bureaucrats on a proposal to nationalize his library between 1915 and 1918; however, Ottawa did not construct a national library until 1953. Today, Barnett’s collection is not as well known as the libraries of his wealthier American contemporaries, such as the bibliophiles J.P. Morgan and Henry Huntington, who established private research institutions that still bear their names. Barnett’s collection was no secret in his day: James Henry Morgan observes in The Canadian Men and Women of the Time (1912) that Barnett “possesses one of the largest private libraries in Can[ada], a considerable portion of which is Shakespeariana” (62). In this essay, I will examine the collecting philosophies and public objectives that shaped Barnett’s national project and motivated his correspondence with renowned Shakespeare scholars, such as J. P. Collier, J. O. Halliwell, and F. J. Furnivall. Although Barnett’s collection was best known for its Shakespearean and Canadian contents, American library precedents hold an important place in his national project. The closest analogy for Barnett’s dream would be the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., which was “shaped primarily by the philosophy and ideas of its principal founder, Thomas Jefferson, who sold his personal library of more than six thousand volumes to Congress to ‘recommence’ its library after its destruction by fire in 1814” (Cole 10). The Library of Congress also adopted Jefferson’s multilingual and interdisciplinary collecting philosophy because, as John Cole observes, “Jefferson believed that ‘there is no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.’ His belief in the necessity of an informed citizenry in a democracy shapes the Library’s determination to widely share its collections” (10). Likewise, Barnett prized the range, diversity, and integrity of his collection. Hence, when the Buffalo Courier reported in 1913 that Harvard University was courting Barnett to buy the Shakespearean component of his collection, the Courier also noted that the collection was not “likely to be dispersed”: Representatives of Harvard University have been negotiating lately, it is understood, to see if the famous Shakespearean library of J. Davis Barnett of Stratford can be secured for that great American seat of learning. It is rather curious that the [End Page 76] finest Shakespearean library in Canada should be in a city no larger than Stratford, and in the possession of a private citizen, yet such is the case.… There is nothing like it in Canada and it is scarcely rivaled in the United States in any private collection.… Mr Barnett has no need to sell, however, and takes his greatest pride in the growth of his library[.] (“Mr Barnett’s”) In this newspaper article, which was reprinted with commentary by the Stratford Beacon, Barnett also hints, perhaps for the first time, that he might donate his collection as a whole to Western: It is generally expected that [the collection] will eventually go to a Canadian university, probably as a gift or legacy, and in this connection McGill...