The joys of Gladstone’s Library
“Can I get a ticket to Hawarden?”
The bus driver looked at me in incomprehension. “Where?”
“Hawarden. Where Gladstone’s Library is.”
His face brightened. “Oh, HAR-DEN! You should have said.”
Arriving at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden (pronounced, as I now know to my cost, “Har-den”) is a revelatory experience. It’s only a few miles from Chester, but it’s set in a bucolic village in North Wales, the kind of place where the general store will sell you a cornucopia of local produce and where the (excellent) pubs know all the locals’ names, preferred drinks and, by the sounds of it, intimate involvement in various scandals. Yet it is the far from scandalous library that dominates the village, both literally and metaphorically. If getting here is something of an odyssey, then one’s eventual arrival represents little less than a homecoming.
Gladstone’s Library is unique in two key respects. It’s the only residential library in Britain, and probably in the world, although this doesn’t mean, alas, that residents hunker down at night in a bivouac with the books; instead, they trot along to one of the 26 bedrooms, which are spartan in their comforts but perfectly pleasant, and sleep peaceably there at the end of a day’s intellectual toil. It is also the only equivalent that we have in this country of an American-style presidential library, although its foundation was considerably less formal and rather more eccentric. William Gladstone, a resident of Hawarden, wished to share his vast collection of books with the less fortunate and intellectually curious – as his daughter Mary put it, “he wished to bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books” – and so, at the age of 85, he spent £40,000 of his own money on founding and building the library that bore his name, obligingly carrying 32,000 of his own volumes three-quarters of a mile between his home, Hawarden Castle, and the temporary structure that housed them.
He did not live to see the library’s construction, but it bears his imprimatur in every regard, from the copious statues and photographs of him that loom imposingly in virtually every direction to the high-minded intellectual attitudes that permeate the place. The central hub of the library lies in the vast two-tiered and wooden-beamed structure that houses the bulk of the collection, mainly consisting of ecclesiastical, political and historical books, including Gladstone’s own volumes. Biographers and other aficionados have had decades of pleasure rifling through Old Glad-Hand’s own annotations, which seldom spared writers who he considered to be intellectually vapid. One often comes across splenetic comments such as “completely untrue” and “nonsense!”, which makes what may have been a voyage through dry-as-dust tomes come alive with the immediacy of a good bitching session.
The library itself is used by a variety of visitors and residents, from local children revising for exams in peace to clerical visitors from far away making the pilgrimage to consult rare and learned scholarly texts. There is a pleasingly intense air of scholarship in the main theology section, with its denizens setting up shop behind their desks as if they have been there for decades, eyebrows twitching knowingly behind piles of ancient books. Yet the reach is a broader and more cosmopolitan one, as well. The library is home to various writers-in-residence throughout the year, who dart about the place looking thoughtful, and who give occasional talks and seminars as part of their month here; the positions are decided by application, and there is no shortage of hopeful literary types anxious to claim the privilege of a month’s stay here, complete with full board and a stipend.
Gladstone himself was a notably ascetic character, but that does not mean that his library is a drab place. There is a bustling canteen-bistro, Food for Thought, which does good-quality, if culinarily unadventurous, meals, specialising in dishes like bangers and mash and apple strudel. In the evenings, one can have a glass of decent Valpolicella for an entirely reasonable £4.50, or retire to the Gladstone Room, a well-presented common room with all the accoutrements that one needs for relaxation: a roaring fire, battered leather armchairs and an honesty bar, which sounds more enticing in theory than it is in practice, thanks to steep-ish prices and a curious lack of ice or lemon for the g & ts. On my visit, the residents were a notably abstemious bunch, too; when I glanced at the record before retiring to bed, the sum total of drink taken had been two glasses of wine. Unless, of course, the scholarly and worthy types I had seen in the library earlier were getting merry on sherry and forgetting to declare it.
Yet this is a place to come and indulge the life of the mind, rather than simple corporeal pleasures – which in any case can be amply catered for at the Glynne Arms a couple of minutes’ walk away. The library is having a £4.5 million extension built imminently, and a planned refurbishment will presumably bring its bedrooms up to a higher standard of comfort, as well as bringing in the usual accoutrements of a shop, a study centre and reception area. These are necessary improvements, and will see Gladstone’s Library well into the 21st century. Yet there is an especial joy in coming here now, before something of the otherworldly and bookish atmosphere dissipates. As Gladstone himself said, “Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.” Such a maxim remains true of this marvellous institution, and hopefully will stay so for the indefinite future.