Exhibitions

Beyond Baconian Boundaries
Bibles in the Durning-Lawrence Library

21st July 2006 -

The library of Sir Edwin-Durning Lawrence (1837-1914), comprising about 5,750 items, came to the University of London in 1931, 75 years ago this year.  Durning-Lawrence was most widely-known as a protagonist in the Bacon-Shakespeare authorship controversy.  He described his library as "Baconian", and claimed to have amassed all of his books with the aim of proving, in his widow’s words, "that Sir Francis Bacon was at the head of a great literary and scientific society, from whence emanated all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature".

The large claim renders Durning-Lawrence’s collection of books both more extensive and more significant than might be imagined from the epithet "Baconian" in an eclusively Shakespearean context.  For example, it explains the presence in his library of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, Don Quixote, Continental emblem books, and a clutch of rare Rosicrucian texts.  In this context, it is unsurprising that Durning-Lawrence owned a copy of the first edition of the King James Version of the Bible (1611), for the more ardent Baconians of his time believed Bacon to be responsible for the final text of the translation of the Authorised Version.  A team of translators had translated the Bible; an individual would have been needed to unify the text; and who but Francis Bacon would have had the ability to do so, argued his supporters.

Yet keen support of the Baconian theory does not explain the many other Bibles in Durning-Lawrence’s possession, now held in Senate House Library.  One outstanding example is the Geneva Bible, undertaken by English exiles in Geneva during the Marian persecutions, and the first English Bible to have been printed in roman type rather than black letter, the first in quarto, and the first in which chapters were divided into verses.  A richly-produced Bible of family interest is an 1877 Bible inscribed to James Clarke Lawrence (1827-1890) in his capacity as Lord Mayor of London by Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and President of the British and Foreign Bible Society. A collection of nineteenth-century Bibles, chiefly New Testaments purchased together in a single lot, in multiple foreign languages, ranging from the standard European ones to Balla, Croat, Fijian, Galla and others, adds diversity.  Durning-Lawrence was a convinced Unitarian, whose religious rather than literary convictions may be evinced through his Bibles.  They constitute an unexpected and enriching facet of his library.