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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 49| February 2001
Claude Prance Collection acquired by the National Library
Claude Prance with a small
part of the collection
Photograph: Damian
McDonald
A substantial part of the private collection of Claude Prance, a book collector and authority on Romantic literature, was recently offered to and purchased by the National Library.
It includes a coherent collection on Charles Lamb and his contemporaries which complements an existing strength of the Libraryits holdings in early nineteenth-century English literature. Other highlights include a full set of the London Magazine; a small number of rare books and material on book collecting, general belles-lettres and books on the theatre.
Mr Prances main interests are in the field of English literature, specifically in the period of Charles Lamb and his circle. He was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire in 1906 and spent most of his career in managerial positions in the Midland Bank. Retiring in 1966 he moved to the Maltese island of Gozo, and subsequently in 1980 to Canberra, where his son Jon and daughter Romaine both live.
Throughout his life Mr Prance has been a keen book collector, and has also published essays and articles on English literature, often drawing on his own collection. His first book of essays, Peppercorn Papers, appeared in 1965. Later volumes were The Laughing Philosopher (1976), Index to the London Magazine (with Dr Frank Riga, 1978), Companion to Charles Lamb (1983), E.V. Lucas and His Books (1988), Essays of a Book Collector (1989), and The Characters in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1992).
Mr Prance has been a member of the Charles Lamb Society since 1936 and a Vice-President since 1983. Charles Lamb and his circle form the centrepiece of his collection of some 8000 books. Mr Prance has suggested that as a collection his Lamb holdings would only be rivalled by the collection of the Lamb Society itself.
Charles Lamb (17751834), the English essayist, was born in London and educated at Christs Hospital at the same time as the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Lamb was a brilliant conversationalist and a perceptive critic, possessed of a number of character traits which led to him being highly valued as a friend. His circle of associates included Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth. Lambs best known work is probably his Tales from Shakespeare (1807; written in collaboration with his sister Mary), but his most important literary work is considered to be the essays he contributed to the London Magazine between 1820 and 1825; collected as Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833).
The London Magazine, distinguished by Charles Lambs contributions, was one of the liveliest of the early nineteenth-century English reviews. Its first editor, John Scott, was mortally wounded in a duel involving a rival publication. Prior to the acquisition of the Prance collection, there was no complete copy of this serial in print form in an Australian library, although it was available in microfilm. Mr Prances copy is a complete set of all 23 volumes, and formed the basis of his index to it. This index is best regarded as an extension of his work on Lamb and his contemporaries. Other notable contributors to the London Magazine include the critic William Hazlitt, the poets Thomas Hood and John Clare, and the essayist Thomas De Quincey, whose famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater first appeared in instalments between October 1821 and December 1822. Two of the London Magazines lesser-known contributors, both friends of Lamb, have quite different connections with Australia. Thomas Wainewright, an artist and art critic, was transported to Van Diemens Land after being convicted of forgery, while Barron Field, who served as a Judge for the Supreme Court of New South Wales, contributed several accounts of journeys around New South Wales.
A few of the highlights from Mr Prances Lamb collection include the second edition of Coleridges Poems, issued in 1797 with a few poems by Lamb and a first edition of Lambs Essays of Elia (1823), as well as many other notable editions of works by and about Lamb. A minor but amusing work, although apparently not one highly regarded by Lamb himself, is his satirical ballad, Satan in Search of a Wife, published in 1831 with illustrations by George Cruikshank. Many related works by Lambs friends and associates are included in the collection. In an essay on his Lamb Library in Peppercorn Papers, Mr Prance notes how expansive an interest in Lamb can easily become. His Companion to Charles Lamb is an equally good case in point, taking the form of a historical dictionary which Richard Holmes, the current doyen of Romantic biography, claimed can be read through like a novel of Romantic manners.
The Charles Lamb component of Mr Prances collection complements and extends the Librarys Nichol Smith collection of eighteenth-century literature, although by no means on the same scale. The Nichol Smith collection comprised a scholars library of about 8000 items, about half of them published before 1800. Mr Prances entire collection consists of 8000 items, with the Lamb component estimated to contain some 700 items. Mr Prances broader interests cover English literature of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and a few items from his substantial collections on the British theatre, natural history and cricket as well as a small number of rare books that complement the Librarys existing collections are also included in this acquisition.
In one of his essays Charles Lamb referred to himself as one whose
treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers.
As a book collector, Mr Prances treasures were also encased between
covers in his library, and through this acquisition the National Library is
privileged to be able to preserve something of his passion for Charles Lamb and
for books.
Philip Jackson
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au