Fonsie Mealy's THE LIBRARY HOWTH CASTLE September 22nd & 23rd, 2021

The Library at Howth T he large library at Howth together with the adjacent book-room were added to the house in 1910 by Sir Edwin Lutyens when my namesake Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence inherited Howth on the death of the 4th Earl, his maternal uncle. It was not the first time that the Gaisfords had needed to build a library- Julian’s father Thomas added one on to Offington, when he bought that house forty years earlier. The Earls of Howth owned books but were not scholars or academics; their library could be accommodated in a few bookcases. The Gaisfords were serious collectors. The Gaisfords came from Wiltshire, a family of yeoman farmers who became clothiers, building and operating water driven woollen mills on the rivers in that county. In 1778 John Gaisford bought Iford Manor on the Frome about eight miles from Bath, a move that signalled the family’s growing prosperity. A year later his eldest son, Thomas, was born. Thomas eschewed the family business and went up to Christ Church, Oxford. He proved an outstanding scholar and quickly attracted the support of Cyril Jackson, the Dean. At the age of twenty-one he became a Student of Christ Church (don). The publication of his edition of Hephaestion in 1807 cemented his reputation and in 1812 he was made Regius Professor of Greek, a position he held till his death forty-three years later. While he was ordained as an Anglican priest, he prioritised his work as a scholar over that as a priest. In 1829 he turned down Wellington’s offer of the Bishopric of Oxford, but two years later was made Dean of Christ Church. For the next twenty-four years till his death in 1855 he ran the cathedral and college, while at the same time regularly publishing scholarly editions of classical Greek texts. Inevitably he acquired a large collection of books, many of them classical texts edited by other scholars. Primarily he was a scholar, not a book collector. However, his eldest son, was the exact reverse. The Dean’s son, another Thomas, was born in 1816 and educated at Rugby where Thomas Arnold had just been made headmaster and, inevitably, Christ Church. He disappointed his father by choosing a career in the army, but this lasted only about ten years before he returned to Wiltshire to live at Iford- his father spent most of his time in the deanery at Christ Church. He married at Laycock in early 1850 Horatia Feilding, the daughter of Admiral Feilding and his wife Elizabeth, who lived there. Elizabeth was also the mother of Henry Fox- Talbot, the English originator of photography who had inherited the Laycock estate on his father’s death. The marriage was short lived, as Horatia died eighteen months later, a fortnight after the birth of her only child, Horace. A number of books in the library have the Feilding bookplate in them. The Dean died in 1855 and in 1857 Thomas was received into the Catholic faith by Manning. Newman was likely the catalyst for his conversion as a considerable correspondence exists between the two men and he was vicar of the University Church, St Mary’s, when Thomas was an undergraduate. Many of the Gaisford family friends in Wiltshire were Anglican clergy and it was not a county that welcomed Catholics. He sold Iford and moved to Offington in Sussex, not 4