Eighteenth-Century Knowledge Work in the Harleian Collection, 1704–1812

This project is the first detailed exploration of the creation, organisation and use of the British Library’s Harleian Collection, one of the original collections which comprised the British Museum upon its formation in 1753. The Collection was created by the first two Earls of Oxford, Robert and Edward Harley, as well as their librarian Humfrey Wanley, in the first four decades of the century, then purchased for the nation. It will consider how the Collection illuminates knowledge work: that is, the labour done by a wide variety of individuals to produce and preserve scholarly understanding. The project addresses private collecting and institutional custodianship, the professionalisation of knowledge work, and the ideological work these performed. It asks how the Collection came into being and developed; how it was shaped by actors including the Harleys, Wanley, and those whose work has been obscured; and how its integration into a national collection and later-century usage relate to practices of knowledge production that intersect with discourses of nation-building. The project works with the understanding (Drucker 1999) that knowledge workers bring their own understanding/interests to their work. It will attend to the predilections and professional identities of the Harleys, Wanley, and others, situating purchases, gifts, and bequests within broader cultures of collection. It will examine Wanley’s professional background, and his procurement, cataloguing, and indexing of the Collection. It will examine Robert Harley’s interests in genealogy and politics, relating his public career to the ideas of English and world history evinced in his library. It will explore Edward Harley’s literary milieu as an impetus for his expansion of the Collection. Mindful of scholarly networks and the necessity of redressing occlusions and biases in archives, it will set these activities in a broader cultural moment. The Collection’s purchase—with Robert Cotton’s and Hans Sloane’s—for the British Museum raises questions about conceptions of national heritage, methods of antiquarian research, and professional practices in knowledge work. The project will consider the implications of the principle that the Collection was to be available “to be consulted by the Curious, and for public Use to all Posterity” (1763 Catalogue Preface). It will analyse the parliamentary debates and public discourse about the Collection to learn how its status was viewed by contemporaries. It will examine the transfer to Montagu House, establishment of the running numbers, and evidence of early use. It will situate the 1759–63 catalogue/index in context as products of the labours of Wanley, David Casley, William Hocker, Andrew Gifford, Charles Morton, Thomas Astle, and others who await recovery. In the period 1763–1812 the Collection was viewed as “the most complete and extensive Fund of national Antiquities that any Kingdom can boast”. Knowledge work was thus bound up with national identity in ways that require investigation. Machlup (1962, 167) shows that “in a Knowledge Economy, the relevant stock of knowledge is not what is recorded in books but rather ‘what living people know’,” prompting questions about how public understanding of the past—British and global—was informed by academic and public engagement with Harleian materials, especially in specialisms such as medievalism and orientalism which accelerated in the 19th century. The project will benefit researchers through new, original scholarship, and it will benefit the Library and its audiences, public and academic, by developing new understanding whilst the Collection is being re-catalogued.