Francis Douce’s resignation letter

Francis Douce (1757-1834) was the Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum. He bequeathed more than 19,000 printed books to the Bodleian Library in Oxford on almost every subject in almost every period: romances, novels, all forms of popular printing, history, biography, antiquities, art, travel, archaeology, drama, children’s books. (If you ever work in the Bodleian and call up a book with a ‘Douce’ shelfmark, that means it’s one of his.) He also left 420 manuscripts, 27,000 prints, 1,500 drawings, and a load of medals and coins.

Here below is one shard from the Douce mountain: the earliest surviving printed advertisement in English publishing history, from about 1476, puffing William Caxton’s edition of a priest’s manual. It was printed at the ‘Red Pale’ in Westminster, Caxton’s print-shop. The request at the end in Latin says don’t remove the notice, so it must have been meant to be attached to a door or wall. (You can see the document via the Digital Bodleian site, here.)

That’s all lovely but Douce also has some claim to having written the best resignation letter, certainly of the 19th century. Here he is, steam coming out of his ears, in 1811, after only 5 years in the job at the British Museum, listing his 13 reasons for storming out. The original document is now Bod. MS Douce e. 28. Look out for the phrase ‘fiddle faddle’.

1.    The Nature of the constitution of the Museum altogether objectionable.

2.    The coldness, even danger, in the frequenting the great house in winter.

3.    The vastness of the business remaining to be done & continually flowing in.

4.    The total impossibility of my individual efforts, limited, restrained & controlled as they are, to do any real, or at least much, good.

5.    An apparent, & I believe real, system of espionage throughout the place & certainly a want of due respect towards and confidence in the officers.

6.    The total absence of all aid in my department.

7.    The apartments I reside in are dangerously cold in winter & like an oven in summer. The whole damp, especially the lower room where my books are in great jeopardy & which I never entered, even in summer time, without being sensibly affected with some kind of pain or unpleasant sensation.

8.    The general unwholesomeness of the air from sinks, drains, the ill-contrived & filthy water closet; & most of all the large & excessively cold bed chamber with an opening to the back kitchen & all its damp & cellar like smells.

9.    The want of society with the members, their habits wholly different & their manners far from fascinating & sometimes repulsive.

10. The want of power to do any good, & the difficulty to make the motley & often trifling committees sensible that they could do any.

11. The general pride & affected consequence of these committees.

12. Their assumption of power, that I think not vested in them.

13. The fiddle faddle requisition of incessant reports, the greatest part of which can inform them of nothing, or, when they do, of what they are generally incapable of understanding or fairly judging of.