The Moxon Collection

On 26 May 1930, Alfred Edward Moxon died at Le Petit Cottage, La Rosiaz-Sur-Lausanne in Switzerland. Despite the place of his passing, Moxon was an Englishman, born in London on 3 March 1862.

Moxon’s will, made on 29 November 1916, contained few specific bequests. He left his piano to Dr Barnardo’s Home in Stepney; family portraits to a cousin; and various watercolours to the Royal Geographical Society. He also bequeathed: “To the Public Library at Plymouth in the County of Devon all my books” together with twelve family coats-of-arms painted on vellum and framed in oak. Moxon was a well-travelled botanist and naturalist, which many of the volumes’ titles reflect.

Why Moxon left his library of some 1,640 volumes to Plymouth Library is not at first apparent. Nevertheless, as per his wishes, the books were dispatched early in 1931, and Mr Frederick Cole, the City Librarian, acknowledged receipt of the books and coats-of-arms dated 9 January 1931 to Theodore Goddard and Co. in London, the solicitors handling Moxon’s estate.

Moxon left the bulk of his estate in Public Trust first to his sister Margaret Louisa, and on her death to found the ‘James Edward and Louisa Sarah Moxon Memorial Fund’, named after his parents, to work alongside the already established Bentham Fund for furthering the study of botany at the Royal Botanical Society. The two Funds were amalgamated in 1984, becoming the Moxon-Bentham Trust. Margaret never did inherit, pre-deceasing Alfred by ten years.

As indicated in his will, Alfred Moxon mixed with individuals of the highest reputation within the late-Victorian and Edwardian botany community. Under a Deed Poll dated 6 September 1886, Moxon nominated Sir David Prain, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer and Sir Arthur William Hill as his trustees. All three were at various times Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, when the holder of that post enjoyed a close working relationship with the government’s Minister for the Colonies. Similarly, the trustees of the Bentham fund were Thiselton-Dyer, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (another Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens) and Daniel Oliver, the librarian at Kew’s herbarium and Professor of Botany at University College, London.

Considering Moxon’s occupation and the circles in which he moved, it came as no surprise to library staff who received the books in 1931 that they were of some significance. As such, the books were installed as the Moxon Collection in purpose-built glass-fronted bookcases in the Central Library, with the twelve family coats-of-arms displayed alongside.

It is the family coats-of-arms that provide a clue as to why Moxon chose Plymouth Library to receive his books. In his will they are described as “Drake Penrose and other Coats of Arms”. Present-day family history resources, such as Ancestry Library Edition, show that Moxon’s mother, Louisa Sarah, born in Essex in 1836, was the daughter of Edward and Maria Drake. In 1851 Louisa was living in the house of her great uncle Charles Penrose in Buckinghamshire, along with several other aunts, uncles and cousins named Penrose, Drake and Moxon. It was not unusual in the early nineteenth-century for cousins and second cousins to marry, and that is true for this particular family. Louisa’s aunt (Edward’s sister), Sarah Ann Drake, also lived in Charles Penrose’s house in 1851. According to "The Moxons of Yorkshire: A Study", published in 1987, Sarah Ann Drake, great aunt of Alfred Moxon, “claimed descent from the Drakes of Devonshire” (page 64).

The most outstanding item amongst Plymouth Library’s Moxon Collection is a very fine copy of John Gould’s "The Birds of Great Britain", published in five volumes in 1873.

John Gould (1804 to 1881) began his working life as a stuffer of birds and animals for the Zoological Society and the aristocracy, including a giraffe for King George IV. During the 1830s Gould developed his passion for birds, analysed Darwin’s Galapagos finches, and published his first illustrated ornithological study, "Birds of Europe".

Given its popular subject matter and patriotic sentiments inspired by the title, "The Birds of Great Britain" attracted 397 subscribers, with each subscriber, including both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, paying a significant £78.15/-.

Principal illustrators and lithographers employed by Gould on "The Birds of Great Britain" included Henry Richter, William Hart, and Joseph Wolf, who was described “as the greatest of all animal painters” by the nineteenth-century ornithologist and zoologist Alfred Newton. The volumes contain 367 vivid colour plates, most heightened with gum arabic, which are considered to be the finest examples of the subjects ever painted. The individual birds are correct in every detail, and are shown in their natural surroundings.

John Gould’s "The Birds of Great Britain" is becoming increasingly rare as volumes are broken up with the plates being sold individually.

In late-spring 1941 the Central Library was hit by incendiary bombs and more than 75,000 books were lost in the inferno. The Moxon Collection (unfortunately not the coats-of-arms) was saved, having been sent to Buckland Abbey for safe keeping at the outbreak of the war. Mr Cole launched an appeal for books to replace those lost. Books were still being donated from around the world into the early-1950s, and in total more than 250,000 were received, many being sent on to other libraries that were also damaged during the war.

Ptolemy Geographia

Two significant donations were made in 1947. Mr William Teal, a retired librarian from Elgin, Illinois, learned of Plymouth Library’s destruction from his cousin living in Downderry near Torpoint. Mr Teal donated his collection of more than 2,000 volumes of North American travel and history interest and American literature.

Mr Teal’s collection was received by Mr W Best Harris, successor to Mr Cole as the City Librarian, as was a very rare volume donated anonymously: a 1520 re-issue of the Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann of St. Dié ‘Ptolemy Geographia’ (first published in 1513): "Ptolemæus Auctus. Restitutus. Emaculatus. Cum Tabulis Veteribis Ac Novis", printed by Johnnes Schott in Strasburg.

The ‘Geographia’, exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1972, includes twenty-seven woodcut reproductions of Ptolemy’s maps depicting the known world in the second century, and twenty of the modern world then being explored by Europeans. Ptolemy’s maps include the British Isles showing a curiously elongated Scotland. The new maps include Tabula Terre Nove (map of the New World) showing a singular continent named Terra Incognita. On his 1507 world map Waldseemüller had named this continent America after the explorer Vespucci Amerigo, and despite changing his mind, America is what the continent became. This map was once thought to have derived from information provided by Columbus, and is often known as the 'Admiral’s Map'.

The new maps section also includes a map of the world in the form of a maritime chart and depicting the then four known continents. It is the type of chart that a wealthy sixteenth century mariner and explorer may have taken with him on his voyages. Indeed, this volume is said to have come from Buckland Abbey, home of Sir Francis Drake, Mayor of Plymouth and MP for the town, and to have been carried by Drake on his circumnavigation of the globe.

The ‘Geographia’ is currently held on behalf of Plymouth Libraries at Plymouth and West Devon Record Office.

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