Joseph Angus, Autograph Collector: Background

Background

In 2003 I uncovered an intriguing collection of autograph letters that passed between Joseph Angus (1816-1902) and Thomas Raffles (1788-1863) in the fall of 1857. These letters reside in the Raffles Collection at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. After completing his M.A. from Edinburgh University in 1838, Joseph Angus (1816-1902) succeeded John Rippon as minister at New Park Street, Southwark.  In 1840 he accepted a position  with the Baptist Missionary Society, succeeding John Dyer as Secretary in 1841.  In 1849 he left the BMS to become President of Stepney College (later Regent’s Park College), a position he held until 1893, during which time he acquired a prominent reputation as a scholar of biblical studies as well as English literature.  Like many Victorians, he exhibited a passion for collecting autographs of prominent individuals, both from previous generations as well as his own. He greatly admired Raffles, a prominent Congregationalist minister at Great George Street in Liverpool from 1812-63. Raffles was also one of the founders of Blackburn College (later Lancashire Independent College) in 1816, chairman of the Congregational Union in 1839, and a well-known author.  Like Angus, Raffles was a serious autograph collector; at the time of his death in 1863, he had acquired one of the largest private collections in Great Britain. It is not surprising, then, that in the fall of 1857 Joseph Angus would turn to Raffles for assistance in creating an autograph collection that would serve as a showcase for Angus’s new college library at Holford House, the spacious mansion near Regent’s Park, London, to which Stepney College had relocated in 1856.

What Angus desired for his college library was a place where he could exhibit letters by important literary figures of his day, an exhibit that would reflect both his own academic interests and elevate the academic stature of Regent’s Park College (at that time loosely affiliated with New College, University of London).  To acquire these literary autographs, Angus traded with Raffles some of his most valued religious manuscripts, such as one of the five volumes he had recently acquired of Philip Doddridge’s MS. of the “Family Expositor” (published in 6 volumes between 1739 and 1756).  He also sent Raffles a considerable amount of Baptist letters, many related to the Baptist Missionary Society. If Angus played a role in providing Raffles with these Baptist letters, he helped to create what is today one of the largest collections of eighteenth and nineteenth century English Baptist letters outside the current Angus Library at Regent’s Park College. Thus, both Joseph Angus and Thomas Raffles had antiquarian and professional needs that were, at least, partially satisfied through an extensive exchange of autographs between October and December 1857.

Angus mounted his most prized collection of literary autographs (68 in all) on heavy cartridge paper and placed them in glass frames on the walls of the library at Regent’s Park College, London (Angus acc. no. 168). An even larger portion of his collection were pasted into two bound volumes and displayed in the library as well (Angus acc. no. 24h.32-33). These autographs (197 in all) were taken primarily from correspondence sent to Regent’s Park College or to Angus and various members of his family.  These two volumes, titled “Autographs,” were carefully labeled by Joseph Angus’s son, Charles Joseph, possibly during his time at Regent’s Park as a lay student in the early 1860s (he later served as the College’s treasurer from 1901-20). These autographs cover the years 1810 to approximately 1880; a number of these authors appear in a list attached to a letter by Angus to Raffles dated 2 November 1857.  Other autographs from some of the leading men and women of science, religion, and belle lettres were exhibited in display cases in the reading room of the library, in most cases pasted inside a book written by these individuals, a collection that included such figures as Sir Charles Bell, John Payne Collier, Alexander Chalmers, Thomas Gisbourne, William Hone, Sir John Herschel, Capel Lofft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir James Mackintosh, John Newton, Hannah More, and Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, to name a few. 

Photographs of the original library at Holford House, taken in the 1860s and the 1890s, reveal a spacious room with two large glass display cases designed to house Angus’s autograph collection, with portraits and other framed objects lining the walls.  By the early 1900s, after the library was converted into a lecture hall, photographs reveal that the glass cases, portraits, and other autograph exhibits were repositioned for display in a smaller anteroom. In March 1927, when Regent’s Park College began its move to 55 St. Giles, Oxford, the facilities at Holford House in London were dismantled. Those books that had manuscripts pasted inside the front covers were taken to Oxford and eventually returned to the stack. A number of these books still retain with the manuscript letters that were affixed to them, just as they were when they left London in 1927. The autograph letters that had been framed and displayed on walls in the library (and possibly other rooms) within Holford House, manuscripts most likely obtained through his exchange with Thomas Raffles, were removed from the walls, still in their frames, and taken to Oxford, where some were apparently re-hung, and others stacked in various places throughout the college, some on top of the tall bookcases in the new college library at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.  Not until 1999 where they found and relocated to the current Angus Library, where they were liberated from their frames and stored in a box for safekeeping, the same box I saw in 2003 and greatly enhanced my previous work with the Thomas Raffles Collection at Manchester. From this discovery, I published the letter exchange between Angus and Raffles in 1857, a previously unknown letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a letter by Thomas Poole, Coleridge’s close friend from Nether Stowey, and a full accounting of the Baptist letters in the Raffles Collection (and other collections at the Rylands Library). This extraordinary archival research can be examined in far more depth and detail in the following articles and books:

1. Timothy Whelan, “Joseph Angus and the Use of Autograph Letters in the Library at Holford House, Regent’s Park College, London,” Baptist Quarterly 40 (2004), 455-76.

2.   Timothy Whelan, “Thomas Poole’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ in a Letter to John Sheppard, February 1837.”  Romanticism 11 (2005), 199-223.

3.   Timothy Whelan, “Coleridge, the Morning Post, and a Female ‘Illustrissimae’:  An Unpublished Autograph, February 1800,” European Romantic Review 17 (2006), 21-38.

4.   Timothy Whelan, “A Chronological Calendar of Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1907,” Baptist Quarterly 42 (2008), 577-612.

5.  Timothy Whelan, ed., Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Baptist History Series, Mercer University Press, 2009).

6.   Timothy Whelan, “Baptist Autographs at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 89.2 (2013), 203-25.

The unraveling of the provenance of the Angus and Raffles autographs provides a fascinating glimpse into the process of autograph collecting in the nineteenth century, as well as the unpredictable fate of such collections.  Though Angus’s collection would never approach the size, scope, and notoriety of that of Raffles’s, the autographs that formed the basis of his display at Holford House represent some of the most important literary, political, scientific, and religious figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Laboring to overcome a level of obscurity and, to a degree, a perception of academic narrowness, Angus worked hard to raise the stature of Regent’s Park College through the creation of a meaningful autograph collection that would demonstrate to visitors the wide range of knowledge he sought to impart to his students. As the old photographs of the library reveal, Angus’s efforts were obviously successful.   Unfortunately, both the Baptist letters he sent to Raffles and the literary letters he received in return, despite dwelling in obscurity for a century, open a new chapter can be written on the activities and interests of two prominent ministers and religious figures of the 19th century.