In the first of what will eventually be a series of studies of the libraries of Australia's nineteenth-century “cultural evangelists” I drew attention some years ago to the difficulties confronting anyone attempting to reconstruct the personal collection of Sir Redmond Barry.1 Although no happy discovery has yet removed the obstacles to full exploration of the subject, interest taken by Mr John Ponder at the time he was on the staff of the Baillieu Library and the Barry centenary celebration itself have encouraged me to bring together the already known documents and to present a work-in-progress report. Several people2 have steered me to relevant material and I hope that this some what premature publication will inspire others to reveal the whereabouts of further fragments of the library dispersed in 1881. In any case the available evidence and the problems it poses will be seen to shed some light on Barry's intellectual interests and, more generally, on the methods that have to be used by would-be historians of the culture of the Australian colonies before Federation.

Barry's zeal for the Melbourne Public Library and the other institutions with which he was so long connected can easily obscure the fact that he continued to be a private collector. Thus, alongside the record of tireless correspondence with booksellers and potential donors on behalf of Melbourne's institutional libraries, one needs to set the letters that show how personally involved he was and felt in the situation of colonial book-buyers. These preoccupations are not absent from his public communications. On 11 April 1860 he wrote to the Rev. Dr Todd at Trinity College, Dublin:

I also send you an account of the progress of our Supreme Court Library from which you may observe that in securing the necessary information for the Law Department we have not been altogether idle. The advantage of such a Library in a country where professional men are deprived of the opportunity of consulting public collections and where the expense of making private collections is very great has been already admitted. The proposed extension meets with a favorable reception.3

Such remarks suggest that, when a comprehensive and bibliographically detailed account of Barry's role as a collection builder comes to be written in extension of the articles already contributed to the La Trobe Library Journal by Messrs Peter Ryan4 and David McVilly5, the letters held in the Public Record Office of Victoria and in the Redmond Barry Papers of the La Trobe Library will be equally valuable as sources. That they have not been drawn on systematically in the present note is one of the latter's more obvious limitations and a further warning of its entirely provisional character.

It is usual to begin — and, alas, too often to end — study of a private library by analysing a post-mortem inventory or auction sale catalogue. In Barry's case neither document seems to have been preserved, although consultation of The Argus's advertisement columns in February and early March 1881 demonstrates that the book sale held on 10 and 12 March 1881 was indeed the object of a printed catalogue. Consequently one has to fall back in the first instance on the advertisements themselves, which are both tantalizingly laconic and irritatingly hyperbolic. The general announcement ran:

THURSDAY, MARCH 10. At Eleven O'Clock.

The LIBRARY of the Late Sir REDMOND BARRY.

To Book Buyers, Public Libraries, Athenaeums, Librarians, Book Collectors, and Others.

GEMMELL, TUCKETT, and Co. have received instructions from the executrix and executor of the late Sir Redmond Barry, K.C.M.G., to SELL by AUCTION, at their rooms, 49 Collinsstreet west, on Thursday, 10th March, The whole of the late Judge Barry's magnificent library, without exception the finest private collection of books ever offered in Melbourne, Comprising

Rare and scarce books, &c., comprising many thousand volumes, many in fine bindings

Catalogues are now ready, and can be had upon application.

The books will be on view the day prior to the sale.

No Reserve. Terms — Cash.6

The advertisement for the second day's sale, also begun at eleven o'clock, repeats most of the earlier information, but indicates the sections held over till 12 March:

Commencing at Lot 419 on the catalogue.7 If one is tempted to doubt the auctioneer's claim about the superlative quality of the offering — and anyone familiar with the many large collections that went through Melbourne rooms in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s will have ample reasons for scepticism —, the editorial columns of The Argus provide a more sober assessment of Barry's library:

Book buyers may be reminded that the library of the late Sir Redmond Barry will be brought to the hammer to-day in the auction-rooms of Messrs. Gemmell and Tuckett. It consists of about 3,000 volumes of English, Greek, Latin, and French literature, including 600 volumes of historical works, a fair collection of belles-lettres, numerous books relating to the fine arts, and the writings of the more famous of the authors of France. Of rare editions or of rare works there are comparatively few, but the general range of the subjects is a wide one, and shows the comprehensive character of the deceased judge's studies.8

A reminder on 12 March is just that and does not attempt to characterize the volumes for sale:

We have been requested to call attention to the fact that the remaining portion of the library of the late Sir Redmond Barry, including the illustrated works and the greater portion of the French literature, will be sold today at Messrs. Gemmell and Tuckett's.9

The extent of Barry's collection can also be gauged in an approximate way from the descriptions of his houses and of his furniture, since these were put on sale early in 1881. Although nothing suggests that the “weatherboard cottage” on the Mulgrave farm contained part of the library, the city residence, Valetta House on the corner of Clarendon and Albert Streets, East Melbourne, was clearly equipped for “the deceased judge's studies”. Both properties were offered by Gemmell, Tuckett and Co. on 9 February 1881, and the advertisement notes that Valetta House had a “study (18 × 13.6)” and a “smoking-room (10 × 16.6)” on the ground floor as well as a “library (25 × 18)“ on the first floor.10 At the sale of furniture and effects on 14 February 1881, apart from such highlights as “MAGNIFICENT OIL PAINTING, by POUSSIN” in the dining-room, the “well-known bay horse Fulton” in the stable and the “choicest collection of rare old WINES ever offered in Melbourne, Including Fine old port, sherry, madeira, malmsey, claret, sauterne, bucellas, &c., ages ranging from ‘47 to ‘75”, the contents of the relevant rooms were specified as:

Study and Smoking Rooms. Secretaire bookcase, blackwood bookshelves

Walnut and other tables, whatnot GENUINE TURKEY CARPET

Mahogany sofa, Vienna chairs, bust, &c. and:

Library.

Set large carved HUON PINE BOOKCASES, made to order by Thwaites Suite in blue-and-gold silk, with ottoman Walnut and rosewood tables and cabinet Real Axminster carpet, 21 × 15

Rich curtains, candelabra, mirrors, Ormolu 21-day timepiece, jardinières Exquisite marble busts of the poets Oil paintings, watercolours, engravings.11 Not all the bookcases seem to have been sold then, since the first day of the book auction on 10 March saw Gemmell, Tuckett and Co. put up

Three large and handsome OPEN BOOKCASES, made to order by Thwaites in the best manner and beautifully finished

1 richly-carved huon pine bookcase, 12 ft.

6 in. in length

2 blackwood bookcases, 6 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 6 in.12

The first listed item is almost certainly the splendid case surmounted by Barry's coat of arms that has found a home in the Anatomy Seminar Room of the University of Melbourne. A brass plaque tells its story:

THIS BOOKCASE OF HUON PINE WAS MADE FOR SIR REDMOND BARRY, THE FIRST CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY (1853–1880). IT WAS BOUGHT FROM HIS ESTATE ABOUT 1881 BY MR. J. H. MACFARLAND, THEN THE NEWLY APPOINTED MASTER OF ORMOND COLLEGE, WHO LATER BECAME SIR JOHN MACFARLAND AND THE SEVENTH CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY (1918–1935). HE HAD THE DOORS ENCLOSING THE BOTTOM SHELVING ADDED. AFTER HIS DEATH IT WAS PURCHASED BY THE UNIVERSITY.

If we want to go beyond an elegant mid-Victorian décor and the general categories of a gentleman's encyclopaedic library, we shall have to look at other documents, in particular earlier incomplete manuscript catalogues of Barry's collection and the books themselves, where they are known to have survived. The latter class is crucial to any really effective assessment of the significance of titles owned by individuals. A mere list indicates at best possession at the time it is drawn up. It does not ordinarily distinguish between books that have been inherited, received as presents, purchased, borrowed or stolen, nor does it usually specify the date of acquisition and whether or not a volume has been read or used. Physical examination of books that pays due attention to binding, provenance, annotations and condition can tell us a good deal about what has happened to a volume since its publication. Unfortunately, descriptive bibliography, which has been more concerned with the transmission of authorial texts than with their impact on the reading public, has not yet developed conventions for recording the signs and marks of a book's post-publication history. Yet a small sample of volumes once owned by Barry illustrates quite neatly the possibilities of an approach that in most cases is the only one available to the historian. Just as students of printing before — or indeed after — 1800 rarely have access to detailed archival records of the work process and have to draw conclusions from the physical evidence provided by the finished products, so too does the explorer of Australian — and European — book trade history in its cultural context need to counteract the destruction of manuscript lists and ephemeral and vulnerable printed auction catalogues by looking closely and with a practised eye at those fragments of private libraries that have come down to us. Given the drawbacks of any list or catalogue, inspection of as many books themselves as possible is highly desirable even when more conveniently analysable and quantifiable documentation is to be had. Like physical bibliographers, book trade historians cannot be content with the broad, sweeping tableau but must operate with meticulously observed minute detail.

Barry's move in 1876 from his house in Rathdowne Street on the corner of Pelham Street and opposite Carlton Gardens seems to have been the occasion for partial listing at least of all his possessions, including his books. The relevant inventories are now in the Redmond Barry Papers of the La Trobe Library13, together with the printed Catalogue of the surplus diningroom, drawingroom, library, study, bedroom, and other household furniture and effects, plate, plated ware, wines, carriages, harness, saddlery, buggy horse, &c., &c. to be sold by public auction by Stubbs & Taylor by order of His Honour Sir Redmond Barry, Knight, &c., &c., &c., at his late residence, Carlton Gardens, on Thursday, the 27th January, 1876, at twelve o'clock precisely, reclassified from the Australian Biographical Pamphlets collection of the State Library of Victoria. 14 At the sale several bookcases from the study, drawing-room and “green bedroom” were offered15 but unsuccessfully according to the account prepared by the auctioneers on 3 February 1876.16 The notebook listing furniture and part of Barry's library shows that bookcases were present in the inner hall and grey bedroom as well as in the study and library (which seems also to be designated as a “Drawing Room”).17

Of the two incomplete book catalogues the more precise is the one contained in the general inventory written by Barry himself, with a little assistance from Mrs Barrow.18 It gives us no more and no less than an account of the books in one room, the “Library” or “Drawing Room” of the Carlton Gardens house. A summary indicates how the five cases were arranged:

The following pages20 detail the contents of each case in turn and list the music. The entries are far from exhaustive bibliographically since they show only title, author and number of volumes. Breaks in sets are indicated, for example “Edinburgh Review (Vols 23 & 40 missing)“21 and “Notes & Queries (Vol 7 Missing)“22, but condition is hardly ever described and nothing is said of formats, publishers’ names and dates of publication.23 Thus accurate identifications are rarely possible.

It is clear that Barry used no rigorous subject classification in shelving books in his library/drawing-room. Indeed what is striking is the extent to which this part of his collection reflects the diversity of interests evident in the categories of the March 1881 sale. Historians — Hallam, Arnold, Niebuhr, Rapin, Robertson —, poets — Quarles, Coleridge, Burns, Tennyson, Keats, Alexander Smith, Longfellow —, novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, Lever, Melville, Scott —, dramatists — Marlowe, Middleton — and travel writers — Hakluyt, Mackenzie, Horneman, Stanhope — sit side by side with philosophers — Hobbes, Bacon —, religious authors — Swedenborg, Calmet. Baxter. Keith, Thomas à Kempis — and even a chemist — Chevreul. The law is largely absent, except for Wilkins’ Leges anglo-saxonicae, but there are dictionaries and works of reference — Gesner, Stephanus, Ainsworth, Bayle, McCulloch —, Dante in English translation and several French texts and sets, including Reybaud, Moliére, Lafon, Massillon, Sully, Commynes, Corneille, Racine and Levaillant's Oiseaux d'Afrique. Apart from the presence of novels there are ample signs here of the seriousness and catholicity of taste that informed Barry's labours on behalf of Melbourne's institutional libraries. However, the mixture is not absolutely standard, not an impersonal model of what the library of a learned judge ought to be. The element of individuality is most obvious in a discreet Irish bias and in unashamed curiosity about the Australian past.

The number of items of Australian or Victorian relevance is both predictable and surprising. Barry's official functions and Melbourne residence are enough to explain his ownership of a volume of “Minutes of Council of the Univ of Melb.” and of another of “Victorian Meteorological Reports”.24 Beyond the utilitarian concerns of the moment lie other works — Martin's “British Colonies” in one volume, Cook's “Voyages” in two volumes, “State of Port Philip”, two volumes of the “Australian Magazine”, Jukes’ “Voyage of the Fly”, ten volumes of Murray's “Home & Colonial Lib.”, Wentworth's “N.S.Wales”, “N.S.Wales its State &c.”. Leichardt's “Expedition to Morton Bay”, “Australia” in two volumes, Phillip's “Voyages” and Barrington's “N.S.Wales”. Most of these titles are concentrated in the book-case left of the fireplace25, as if to underline the fact that they were perceived as a group of books about, produced in or exported to the Australian colonies. Angus & Robertson, The Bulletin and David Scott Mitchell have collectively blinded us to the realities of national cultural and intellectual consciousness in Australia before 1880. Barry's books are a simple reminder of the strength of an earlier generation's attachment and commitment to its new Antipodean homeland. For these founders and builders of our cultural institutions Australia was already a subject for collecting, reading and study. A colony, like a province, can have an identity and set no limits on its aspirations even when it remains aware of and grateful for its European cultural heritage. In Barry's library — as in those of his as yet unstudied Victorian contemporaries — one can see something of this easy and unaffected acceptance of Australian-ness, this middle way between the cringe and the strident refusal as a response to the intellectual attractions of London and Paris.

The twenty-eight volumes of music stood apart in the drawing-room.26 Twelve of them were glees by Bishop, Calcott and Webbe, but Haydn's Seasons, Handel's Judas Maccabaeus and Acids and Galatea, “Piano Forte Works Mozart vol 8” and “La Traviata &c” counterbalance Rethel, Slater, Retzsch and Dixon. A rudimentary subject division is also found in the other manuscript list from this period.27 In all 313 items are split between “History”, 1–80, “Voyages Travels &c,”, 81–96, “Miscellaneous”, 97–253, and “French”, separately numbered 1–60. The sudden recourse to “Miscellaneous” to cover titles as diverse as “Paradise Lost”, “Paley's Evidences”, “Repton's Landscape Garden”, “Harris’ Hermes”, “Watson's Chemistry”, “Amadis of Gaul”. “McNally's Justice of the Peace”, “Spanish Grammar”. “Beckford on Hunting”. “Regimental Companion”. “Fable of the Bees”, “Caleb Williams” and “White's Sermons” is symptomatic of a fairly lax attitude towards classification. The “History” section likewise embraces not only Hume. Smollett. Holinshed. Clarendon and Gibbon but also thirteen volumes of “Parliamentary Debates”, six volumes of “Finance Reports”. “Locke on Government” and Blackstone. Although there is a not inconsiderable overlap between this list and the contents of the drawing-room, the differences are enough to bring out other aspects of Barry's personal history and interests. Thus a small group of works on military subjects (items 218–225) reminds us that the son of Major-General H. G. Barry had himself hoped for a commission in the army and been educated to this end. The strength of the French collection, with its heavy emphasis on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classics — Voltaire. Montesquieu. Boileau.Marmontel. Racine. Moliére, La Bruyére, Rousseau. Scarron, Fénelon, Le Sage — and its evidence of reading on a variety of topics such as numismatics, mediaeval history, famous trials and cooking (“Almanach des Gourmands”), is a sign not only of the lingering cultural hegemony of the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV but also of the genuine taste for reading modern foreign languages in the days before they were included in University curricula and ceased to be part of the experience of educated men (and even women). Barry's Irish origins are betrayed again in the “History” section in particular (items 20–32). but, apart from Cook's Voyages (item 87), the Australian connection is not in evidence. This is another reason to suppose that the catalogue, incomplete though it must be, reflects a somewhat earlier stage in Barry's collecting. What remains beyond doubt is the range of the judge's curiosity.

How, when and where did Barry acquire his books? For answers to these questions we have to go essentially to the volumes themselves. Bibliographies are not prominent in the manuscript inventories. The drawing-room had one volume of the “London Cat. of Books”28, and, more significant. De Bure's Bibliographie instructive. a classic manual for bibliophiles, appears along with the French titles of the earlier list (item 54). If Barry had private copies of the booksellers’ and auction catalogues he saw in the course of his work for the institutional libraries, they are not noted amongst his possessions. Yet it is not difficult to imagine the opportunities for bookbuying that came his way. In Ireland. England and on the Continent before he left for Australia in 1839 and again during his European and American tours in 1862 and in 1877–1878 he could go direct to the resources of great marketplaces. In Victoria he could and did operate by correspondence, but he also visited neighbouring colonies. More important, the Melbourne whose University and Public Library he guided to a proper ambition for greatness had become by 1860 a more than respectable market for new and old books. In the 1860s and 1870s the bibliographical riches available — and still unchronicled — would doubtless have outrun the judge's purse. He was a witness to, and in many ways a participant in, the third and most satisfactory phase of Australian bookselling history, one that lasted from the post-Gold Rush or ganization of a locally dominated trade to the setting up, in the last quarter of the century, of Melbourne branches of British publishing houses.29

Where then are the books dispersed at the March 1881 sale? How can they be identified? For the moment it is largely a matter of chance, although the Australia and New Zealand Early Imprints Project will eventually record the provenance of volumes printed before 1801 and held in our libraries. Barry used a series of armorial bookplates bearing the family motto “BOUTEZ EN AVANT” and his name. Although it is not unknown for ex-libris to wander posthumously to enhance the value of other men's books, in this instance they are the commonest mark of a Carlton Gardens or Valetta House provenance. Signatures and especially dates of acquisition are less usually found, even without the depredations of in considerate repairers and rebinders. Ultimately it should be possible to assign approximate dates to the various versions of the bookplate, one of which may well have been designed for and used by an ancestor and namesake who graduated B. A. from Trinity College. Dublin, in 1787, the year he wrote his signature in a copy of the 1751 Foulisedition of De sublimitate commentarius of Dionysius Longinus now held in a Melbourne private collection.30 Libraries like the Baillieu Library of the University of Melbourne that have begun indexes of provenances offer the best resource other than serendipity for discovering the lost fragments of Barry's library. However, the circumstances of the dispersal ensure that Barry books may turn up at any time in bookshops or in auctions. The fate of a Baskerville Virgil of 1757 bearing the engraved bookplate of Gregory Lewis Way (Christ Church, Oxford, 1774), the inscription “Redmond Barry Melbourne Port Phillip Australia Felix January 28 1847” and a Barry bookplate, the ex-libris of W.P. Firebrace, the ticket of the Melbourne bookseller A.B. Scott, and, finally, the plate of the Alfred Hart Bequest of 1950 to the University of Melbourne is less extraordinary than it might seem. In other cases sets have been broken in the century of vicissitudes since the 1881 sale. Of the five volumes of “Watson's Chemistry” (item 191 in the “Miscellaneous” section) three have come to rest temporarily in another private collection. Volume one only of the Barbou Ovid of 1762 is now in a third. Such books are a mere sample of the disregard earlier generations of Australian bookbuyers had for interesting local provenances.

The student of Barry's attitudes and legal practice will, of course, want to go further than ownership to solid evidence of reading and use. In the form of annotations this certainly can be demonstrated in some of his books, notably in his interleaved copy of An Act to consolidate the Law relating to Crimes and the Practice in Criminal Courts (2 June 1864), wisely transferred by the National Library of Australia to its Manuscripts Collection, in Thomas Peake's Compendium of the Law of Evidence (London, Reed & Hunter, 1813 — State Library of Victoria duplicates), and in Junius (London, printed for Henry Sampson Woodfall, 1772, 2 volumes — State Library of Victoria). Discovery of material of this kind can justify systematic and inevitably time-consuming searches in those libraries that are accessible to the public.

Despite the sale of Barry's books after his death, it would be a mistake to imagine that his contribution to the Melbourne Public Library was exclusively administrative. The Catalogue of Donations to the Public Library of Victoria, from 1856 to 1872 records a respectable quantity of gifts31, many of them made in 1863 after Barry's first return trip to Europe and possibly from recent purchases from Guillaume, the Library's first London supplier.32 Moving house in 1876 induced Barry to part with a substantial number of volumes, as recorded in the official report of the Trustees.33 Cynics could point to some broken sets in the lot, but this would ignore the counterbalancing presence of some remarkably interesting volumes, in particular a copy of Heylin's A Help to English History in the 1709 duodecimo edition. Given to Barry in 1864 by Richard Clarke Sewell the volume bears one of the bookplates of Horace Walpole and its migration to Melbourne remained unknown to the late Wilmarth Lewis.34 The State Library of Victoria duplicate collection has a copy of R. Morris and W.F. Finlason, The Common Law Procedure Act (London, Stevens and Norton, 1852) inscribed to Barry on 29 December 1852 by Sir William à Beckett — a further indication that presents from friends and colleagues were not unimportant in building up the bookstock in the Carlton Gardens house.

Indeed the small part of Barry's library that has been so far rediscovered illustrates very well the diversity of his sources of supply — family, including his aunt Eliza Arabella Barry35, local and overseas shops in the early Port Phillip years, buying trips abroad, gifts. Nothing suggests that there was buying for show, to furnish a gentleman's residence. The bookishness is lifelong and unfeigned, and this is why the effort of reconstruction applied to a central activity of a key figure in the cultural and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Australia is more than justified, why a bibliographer cannot refuse the challenge of the lost library of Redmond Barry.