The Earliest Books at the University of London (1838): 185 Volumes Presented by Nathaniel Vye, Esq.

Abstract

The University of London was established by royal charter in November 1836, and its first donations of books are recorded in Senate Minutes of 1838. 1 The list begins, atypically for the years before 1871, with two bulk donations. The first of these summarises: 'Parliamentary Reports and Papers on Education in England, Scotland and Ireland. Presented by the Chancellor and Mr. Warburton', and refers to minutes of the Committee of the Faculty of Medicine for a full list. These minutes show the reports to date from 1809 to 1837, and to focus on Ireland; most are on primary or secondary education, and appear unrelated to universities (a local English example is 'Reports from the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis'). 2 The record of the second bulk donation states briefly: '185 volumes. Presented by Nathaniel Vye, Esq.' Nothing indicates the further identity of the donor or the motivation for the donation, and, unlike the educational reports, no list survives elsewhere. It is this hitherto unidentified group of books which forms the basis for this article.Nathaniel Vye appears not to have been a University man; certainly nobody of that name is recorded in Foster or Venn. 3 The Vye family was an established one at Ilfracombe in Devon (with a family tomb in the churchyard and monument in the church there), and Nathaniel was a family name: the 62 men sworn in as special constables and listed on a handbill from the 'Ilfracombe Association for the Preservation of the Peace', dated 7 December 1830, included, alongside William Vye and W.B. Vye, both 'Nathaniel Vye senior' and 'Nathaniel Vye junior'; 4 a third Nathaniel Vye, 'eldest son of Nathaniel Vye, of Ilfracombe, Devon', was a student of the Middle Temple on 14 January 1840 and was called to the bar on 5 May 1843. 5 The eldest of the three Nathaniel Vyes mentioned here, born in 1759, is named in the first decade of the nineteenth century as selling brigs, 6 and was also a banker, dissolving his partnership in Ilfracombe with William B. Vye and G. Harris in 1828. 7 Having died in 1835, he could scarcely have donated books in 1838 -although he could feasibly have owned them --and his lawyer grandson, born in 1818, is somewhat young to have been the donor. This leaves the middle Nathaniel Vye (1791-1840), evidently a man who took an interest in the community; he is mentioned in 1837 as Vice-Chair at a Devonshire Reform Dinner in the Ilfracombe Rooms. 8 Professionally, he was a medical man,

The Earliest Books at the University of London: A Supplement

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In 2016 I published an article in the pages of this journal reconstructing the donation of the Ilfracombe medical practitioner Nathaniel Vye to the University of London in 1838, the first bulk gift of early printed books to the new University. 1 The donation had been described as constituting 185 volumes, 2 several of which were components of multivolume works. My reconstruction comprised 98 titles (including several multivolume works), of which 73 were marked as having been Vye's and 23 could confidently be deduced as having been Vye's.Two further titles were required to complete the list, and three titles from the University of London Library's catalogue seemed plausible candidates.

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