Augustus Theodore (Theo) Bartholomew (26 August 1882 – 14 March 1933) was a librarian at

Cambridge University Library Cambridge University Library is the main research library of the University of Cambridge. It is the largest of the over 100 libraries within the university. The Library is a major scholarly resource for the members of the University of Cambri ...

from 1900 until his death in 1933. He maintained friendships with a number of significant individuals, including Siegfried Sassoon, the novelist Forrest Reid and the uranian poet and librarian Charles Sayle. He was editor, with Henry Festing Jones, of the works of Samuel Butler (published 1923–6) and collected material for a biography of

Frederick Rolfe Frederick William Rolfe (surname pronounced ), better known as Baron Corvo (Italian for "Crow"), and also calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe (22 July 1860 – 25 October 1913), was an English writer, artist, ph ...

Life

Early life and education

Bartholomew was born in Walthamstow, the youngest of eight children to Alice Mary Bartholomew (née Chaplin) and Charles Augustus Bartholomew, his father having died shortly before his birth. His mother moved the family to Fowlmere, near Cambridge, and he attended the Nonconformist

grammar school A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school ...

in Bishop's Stortford. His mother's lack of funds forced him to leave school at an early age, and seek employment nearby. In spite of his limited education, Bartholomew felt from an early age a definite desire for a career in books. Initial enquiries to Robert Bowes' bookshop in Cambridge and the Bodleian Library in Oxford were unsuccessful, and he spent the summer of 1899 working in the Public Library in Norwich. At the age of 17 he found a job as "Second-Class Assistant" at the University Library at Cambridge (then housed in the mostly medieval Old Schools building), and started work on 29 January 1900 earning 10 shillings a week. In 1901 he was able to enter Peterhouse, Cambridge, as an undergraduate, graduating in 1904 and moving from lodgings on Lensfield Road in Cambridge to Kellet Lodge on Tennis Court Road. In 1906 he became friends with the novelist Forrest Reid, and made his first visit to Venice in 1907, where he met the uranian poet

Horatio Brown Horatio Robert Forbes Brown (16 February 1854 – 19 August 1926) was a Scottish historian who specialized in the history of Venice and Italy. Born in Nice, he grew up in Midlothian, Scotland, was educated in England at Clifton College and Oxfor ...

Sexuality

Bartholomew was homosexual. In his youth, he had been a member of the circle of handsome (and sometimes homosexual) young men who congregated at Charles Edward Sayle's house in Cambridge, including Rupert Brooke,

George Mallory George Herbert Leigh Mallory (18 June 1886 – 8 or 9 June 1924) was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. Born in Cheshire, Mallory became a student at Winchest ...

and

Geoffrey Keynes Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes ( ; 25 March 1887, Cambridge – 5 July 1982, Cambridge) was a British surgeon and author. He began his career as a physician in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where h ...

, who remained a close friend throughout his life. Charles Sayle, employed at Cambridge University Library since 1893, became one of the chief figures in his life, taking the young Bartholomew under his wing. In 1909 they invited Henry James to visit Cambridge, where he stayed at Sayle's house. Sayle soon became insecure about his young friend deserting him (Sayle was 18 years Bartholomew's senior). But they remained friends until Sayle's death in 1924, by which time Bartholomew (now in his early forties) now suffered from similar anxieties of growing old in an ever-youthful university city. He corresponded with authors he admired, including

Edward Carpenter Edward Carpenter (29 August 1844 – 28 June 1929) was an English utopian socialist, poet, philosopher, anthologist, an early activist for gay rightsWarren Allen Smith: ''Who's Who in Hell, A Handbook and International Directory for Human ...

(to whom he wrote about the book
Iolaus
in 1902 and whom he met in 1911),

Magnus Hirschfeld Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Com ...

(whom he met at one of Edward Dent's dinner parties in 1910) and

Ralph Chubb Ralph Nicholas Chubb (8 February 1892 – 14 January 1960) was an English poet, Printer (publisher), printer and artist. Heavily influenced by Walt Whitman, Whitman, William Blake, Blake, and the Romanticism, Romantics, his work was the creati ...

(a younger Cambridge poet whose homosexual poems and paintings had inspired Bartholomew's interest).

Librarianship

After graduation he became part of the team tasked with cataloguing

Lord Acton John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902), better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he w ...

's library of 60,000 books, which he had donated to Cambridge. The task took nine years. He became Under-Librarian at Cambridge in 1913, a position he held until his death in 1933. Books were of course one of his primary interests and in 1903 he was among the first members of the University'
Baskerville Club
In 1909 he bought a copy of the

Doves Press The Doves Press was a private press based in Hammersmith, London. During nearly seventeen years of operation, the Doves Press produced notable examples of twentieth-century typography. A distinguishing feature of its books was a specially-devis ...

''Shakespeare's Sonnets'' at a cost of £1 10s (which he called 'a horrible extravagance') and in November that year was sounded out by Sydney Cockerell about becoming

Emery Walker Sir Emery Walker FSA (2 April 1851 – 22 July 1933) was an English engraver, photographer and printer. Walker took an active role in many organisations that were at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement, including the Art Workers G ...

's assistant. Through

, he became acquainted with Gwen and

Jacques Raverat Jacques Pierre Paul Raverat (pronounced Rav-er-ah) (20 March 1885– 6 March 1925) was a French painter; Raverat was the son of Georges Pierre Raverat and Helena Lorena Raverat, née Caron; he was born in Paris, France, in 1885. Raverat s ...

(Gwen, a granddaughter of

Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended ...

, was the sister of Keynes' wife Margaret) and acquired a copy of Jacques' edition of

William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...

's ''The marriage of heaven and hell'' (printed at the Ashendene Press in just 24 copies in 1910). With Keynes Bartholomew worked on

John Evelyn John Evelyn (31 October 162027 February 1706) was an English writer, landowner, gardener, courtier and minor government official, who is now best known as a diarist. He was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. John Evelyn's diary, or ...

, the two publishing a handlist of his works in 1916 (in 25 copies), and for a time Bartholomew worked on editing Evelyn's diary for publication until giving it up in 1921. He collected a wide range of books, including many on

homosexuality Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to pe ...

and sexology. In 1915 Bartholomew met Siegfried Sassoon and helped with the publication of his poetry, including ''Picture Show'' in 1919. Bartholomew's collection of Sassoon's works, and some of his manuscripts, is now at Cambridge University Library in th
collection
of

. In 1917 Bartholomew became friends with the American typographer Bruce Rogers, who had been employed by Cambridge University Press. Rogers went on to design Bartholomew's bookplate along with several publications. Bartholomew also struck up a correspondence with Hilary Pepler (at the St Dominic's Press), and encouraged him to send copies of his private press material to Cambridge University Library. Bartholomew was exempted from military service during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

by reason of his poor eyesight. During the chaotic war years, Bartholomew's sane and precise habits became vital to the smooth functioning of the library. He provided much bibliographical structure for the ''Cambridge History of English Literature'', edited by Sir Adolphus Ward and A. R. Waller.

Literary work

Bartholomew left behind him not only his considerable contributions to the life of the University Library, but also his literary research, of which the most significant were his involvement in editing the works of the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler (novelist), and the gathering together of material on the life and work of

). His work on Butler began in 1910, when he heard a paper on his life by Henry Festing Jones. The two soon became friends, a relationship which culminated in Bartholomew's work on ''The Shrewsbury edition of the works of Samuel Butler'', published in twenty volumes between 1923 and 1926. At Festing Jones' death in 1928, Butler's literary executorship passed to Bartholomew. His work on

had a somewhat less happy ending. In 1918 he set about gathering material for a possible biography of the eccentric author, who had died in Venice in 1913. He compiled a scrapbook of material from various sources, including Rolfe's publisher Grant Richards, the uranian poet

(who had lived in Venice for much of his life) and Rolfe's family. But A. J. A. Symons, founder of the First Edition Club, published a piece on Rolfe in 1926 which focused on the more scandalous aspects of his life, and for reasons which are unknown, Bartholomew eventually gave up on his projected biography. At Bartholomew's death his precious scrapbook (now at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas) was lent to Symons, who used it extensively for his 1934 biography of Rolfe, entitled ''Quest for Corvo''.

Later life, and death

In 1926, Bartholomew began to suffer from bouts of depression, which eventually developed into an all-consuming melancholy. This serious affliction was quite satisfactorily cured by a programme of psychological intervention, to which Bartholomew agreed on condition it did not alter his homosexuality. In the years left to him, Bartholomew applied his characteristic sense of cleanliness and order to his new home in Millington Road. He had inherited good taste in furniture from his family, who came from a long line of cabinet-makers (George Bartholomew & Co. of Finsbury Pavement, London). To this he added his knowledge of books and prints, and with these he decorated his house (including hi
portrait
by John Wells, now hanging in the University Library), and so began to enjoy a well-deserved domestic comfort. His enjoyment was cut short; in 1932 he began to suffer from severe headaches, caused by high blood pressure. Within a year he was dead, at the age of 51. The task of writing Bartholomew's obituary fell to Keynes, one of his executors (along with Brian Hill and W. J. H. Sprott)Sprott's copy of Bartholomew's will is at King's College Cambridge (King's/PP/WJHS/1/4) who wrote: Bartholomew's diaries (covering the period 1904 to 1925) are housed at Cambridge University Library (MS Add.8786/1/3-14), and he also appears frequently in the diaries of Charles Sayle (CUL MS Add.8501-8510). An article on Bartholomew appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of ''The Book Collector.''

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bartholomew, Augustus Theodore 1882 births 1933 deaths Alumni of Peterhouse, Cambridge English librarians British bibliographers People from Walthamstow People from Fowlmere English LGBT people