ABSTRACT
Richard Henry Major was Honorary Secretary of the Hakluyt Society for all but two of its first twenty years; he was a joint Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society for fifteen years; he was an active participant in the affairs of the Society of Antiquaries for twenty years; and he was, arguably, the leading figure in Britain in the history of cartography and discoveries. Above all, he was a member of the British Museum Library from the age of 25 until retirement forty years later, as the first and only Keeper of Maps. Despite this impressive range of achievements, Major has attracted no biographical notice since the entry in the original Dictionary of National Biography, conveniently published the year after his death. Nor, perhaps, have the similar contributions of the Museum colleagues of Major been given adequate recognition. The previously unremarked scale of their involvement in the early history of the Hakluyt Society is certainly not an isolated instance of the part they played in the intellectual life of the day. The central concern of this biographical memoir is with R. H. Major and the Hakluyt Society. But although it is, for convenience, structured to separate out Major’s various professional activities from his private life, the result of this investigation makes the precisely opposite point: that domestic ‘trivia’ can be as informative as the measured deliberations of a governing body, that any search restricted to formal sources will miss many of the interconnections which help to explain how the intellectual life of Victorian London worked in practice. Like the novels of Major’s contemporary Dickens, with their large but finite casts, those who supported Major in his various endeavours will reappear time and again in different contexts.
