Esmond de Beer, benefactor

• Iolo Williams collection
• Evelyn collection
• Locke collection

He was discreetly generous to numerous libraries and scholarly enterprises. He devoted time to seeking out projects that needed help and recipients were often surprised to get financial or practical support before they had asked for it.

Great scholarship and great financial resources are regrettably rare companions.

[Simmons]

His gifts to the Bodleian Library were such that his name was added to its lapidary Benefactors' Tablet. Other beneficiaries included the British Library, the London Library and Lambeth Palace Library. The remarkable collection of New Zealand literature in the Library of the University of Essex is due to his subvention over many years.

(We) always thought of Dunedin as our 'home', our essential background, and have wanted to do what we could towards the furtherance of its learning and culture.

[Esmond de Beer, writing for his sisters Dora and Mary, and himself.]

His chief concern, however, was that the University of Otago Library should be well equipped for research (see his letter to Mr. Havard-Williams). During the course of his work on Evelyn and Locke, he collected fine and rare volumes which are now in the de Beer Collection of the University of Otago Library. Over many years he, together with his sisters, gave the Library the support and encouragement it required to build up a rare book collection of a size and quality which is unique among New Zealand university libraries.

In addition to the many hundreds of rare books he donated, large item reference works and subscriptions to journals were also financed. Monetary support of the Library was substantial and on his death he left the greater portion of his considerable estate to the University Library for the continued development of the de Beer Collection.

List of exhibits

He also provided most generous and discreet patronage to numerous libraries and scholarly and cultural enterprises. His vision of Dunedin as a cultural centre has been realised to a great extent through his generosity to the University as also to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Otago Museum. His wish for anonymity precludes mention of some of the great gifts to the University research community to which he was a contributor. Other institutions in Dunedin also benefited from the generosity and support of Esmond de Beer, his sisters and extended family.

Iolo Williams collection

In 1958 de Beer, together with his sisters, purchased from his friend, Iolo Williams, his collection of some two thousand volumes of minor 18th-century verse and presented it to the University Library.

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Evelyn collection

Early in 1929 de Beer was approached by the Clarendon Press to edit the first, complete edition of The Diary of John Evelyn. Following his first meeting with de Beer, R. W. Chapman, Secretary to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, described de Beer as a ‘shy bird of independent means' but by 1931 he was calling him the ‘heaven-born editor of the slap-up edition'. De Beer was thirty-six years old when he started work on the Diary and sixty when it was published. In characteristic generosity, he arranged for forty copies at a cost of 15 guineas each to be presented to friends and others who had assisted him. The work was acclaimed as a masterpiece with the index volume singled out for special praise:

[It is] surely unique amongst the whole collection of books published in English. You can explore any topic touched on in the diary under any head you like, recover any detail you please, and you can do it easily, as an interesting pursuit in itself. Computerized indexing is simply not in the same class. [Laslett]

De Beer's editorial skills continue to be cited as a benchmark of excellence to this day. In a recent review of John Evelyn's Elysium Britannicum, which was published in December 2000, the quality of editorial scholarship is regretted.

It makes an ironic contrast with E.S. de Beer's six-volume edition of Evelyn's Diary (1955), one of the most meticulous pieces of literary scholarship ever produced. [Thomas]

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Included with the Evelyn collection which de Beer gave the Library in 1983 were six hundred travel and guide books dating from the 16th to the 18th century, the majority of Italy and Rome. He wrote several articles on aspects of guide books and believed them to be ‘worthy of study in their own right'.

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Locke collection

On 11 May 1956 de Beer, now aged sixty, was appointed to edit The Correspondence of John Locke. It was to be his main preoccupation for the next twenty-five years. It involved dealing with several thousand individual documents and over 300 correspondents. The intellectual range was universal - theology, medicine, geography, economics, law, politics, travel and botany.

The Correspondence of John Locke was published over a number of years, volumes 1 to 7 from 1976 to 1981. De Beer was now in his middle eighties and was going blind. He had already completed the transcription of all the known correspondence and almost completed annotating it to his own exacting standards when he had to cease work. The editorial board of the Clarendon Press took over from him and volume 8 appeared in 1989. The vital index volume on which de Beer had worked ‘while there was light' remains unpublished to the regret of Locke scholars worldwide.

His editorial work was again acclaimed for its meticulous scholarship.

[Dr. de Beer's] knowledge is encyclopedic; his translations of Latin texts are elegant; not a word in his introduction and annotations is wasted; he is scrupulous in describing and consistent in maintaining his editorial principles; and where a dating or an identification is uncertain he carefully indicates the degree of doubt, and the reasons for his views, and he never guesses … When the eight volumes of Correspondence have appeared they will be recognised as one of the great scholarly achievements of their day. [Haley]

In 1984 Esmond de Beer donated more than five hundred books acquired while editing the correspondence. They included more than three hundred pre-1801 imprints on politics, philosophy, education and economics. Many of the works by Locke and his contemporaries are rare first editions.

List of exhibits