Wisbech in north Cambridgeshire was a wealthy port in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was home to bankers, writers and influential social reformers including Thomas Clarkson. Its museum, founded in 1847, contains about six thousand books bequeathed by Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798–1868), a friend of Charles Dickens who shared Dickens' fascination with mesmerism and the occult. His library was typical of 'a gentleman of wealth and great culture' and contained works of fiction in several languages, non-fiction and science, many of which were rare and finely bound. Since 1877 the Museum has also housed the library of the Wisbech Literary Society (founded in 1781), which focused on history, biography and travel. This 1882 catalogue of the 12,000 volumes in the two Wisbech collections provides fascinating insights into the reading habits of a successful British business community on the one hand, and an influential Victorian collector on the other.
