Alexander Larman

Gladstone’s Library began as that most English of things: a great man’s visionary idea. William Gladstone, at the age of 85, decided that he had amassed too many books, and wanted to share them with the less fortunate. As his daughter Mary put it: ‘He wished to bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books.’ He duly spent £40,000 of his own money on founding and building the library that bore his name, carrying 32,000 of his own volumes three-quarters of a mile between his home, Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, Wales, and the temporary structure that housed them, aided only by his valet and the long-suffering Mary. He did not live to see the library built, but the John Douglas-designed building was completed in 1902, intended both as a permanent memorial to Gladstone and as a residential establishment where readers might come and take intellectual solace amidst books — 250,000 of them, to be exact.