This week I paid my first visit to the National Art Library, which is housed in the Victoria Albert Museum in London. The splendid library is open three days a week, and I wanted to look for recent research on bible mania in the nineteenth century, and evidence of the response to the output of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The Victoria and Albert Museum is a treasure house of art and technology and represents many of the Victorian values also reflected in the overseas missionary movement and its associated Bible societies. It is the confidence and assumption of superiority that seems so anachronistic today, and the assumption of right to power and civilization. With friends, I wandered through the new galleries to Asian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese art, then made my way through the ‘cast galleries’ of what were believed to be the great western works from Christian Europe. The National Art Library is on the second floor, and they are exceptionally welcoming to visitors. After signing up online and providing an address, visitors were welcome to use the library.
It was a pleasure to access printed collections of valuable and large-format volumes, all placed in accessible galleries. Every desk enjoys the luxury of a book stand for managing the large volumes which line the shelves.
Although I have read it online many times, I was able to re-visit the article on Bible Societies in the 11th edition of the Encylopedia Britannica (EB), the version published by Cambridge University Press in 29 volumes from 1910 to 1911. Although Edward VII (r. 1901 – 1910) scarcely lived to enjoy it, this edition exudes the values and confidence of the Edwardian age, the maximalist point of the expansion of the British Empire. The entry on the Bible (vol. 3, pp. 849-894), left no doubt as to the stature of this work in the views of the EB editors; it was followed by another leisurely account of the English Bible (pp. 894-905), which points out that the controversy and labour involved in what remains the only authorised revision of the King James version. The revision to the New Testament (published in 1881) was completed in 407 meetings over more than ten years; that of the Old testament (published in 1885) took 792 days, with the Aprocrypha finally published in 1894. This casts a valuable light on the challenge of translating the Bible into other global languages, and an appreciation of the intellectual, linguistic, social and political negotiations that drove their production.
The article on ‘Bible Societies’ was written by the Rev. Thomas Herbert Darlow, the co-editor with H. F. Moule of the monumental account of the Bibles held by the BFBS, the Historical catalogue of the printed editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1903 -11). This mighty catalogue deserves an entry of its own, but it is testament to Moule and Darlow’s scholarship and rigour that it remains in use, while regularly updated, to this day. In his EB entry, Darlow gives considerable prominence to the BFBS, but does not entirely neglect predecessors, including the Canstein Society, the SPCK, the The Protestant Bible Society of Paris (Société Biblique Protestante de Paris) and even the Roman Catholic Propaganda.
One purpose of my visit was to advance work for my presentation later in the month on ‘The Future of Research in Bible Society Collections‘. This is organised by Joshua Fitzgerald, Eyal Poleg, Lucy Sixsmith and Harry Spillane at the University of Cambridge. I will be presenting on our efforts to identify mother tongue translators in the archive. This is always a challenge given the Bible Society’s firm policy of publishing ‘without note or comment’, but there are vestiges of the work of native speakers in the correspondence and letter books of the Society. Let us see how many we can uncover.