Biographies

Henry & Elizabeth Yates Thompson

Henry Yates Thompson (1838-1929), the eldest of five sons of a Liverpool banker, graduated from Trinity in 1862. He spent several months in America during the Civil War, becoming a committed advocate of the abolition of slavery. Though trained as a barrister, he was by temperament a scholar, with the means to travel widely. He was to put together an unrivalled private collection of illuminated MSS and early printed books.  A man of strong liberal views, and from Cambridge the friend of both Henry Sidgwick and Basil Champneys, he supported in cash and kind the controversial founding of a College for women.

In 1878 he married Elizabeth (or‘Dolly’, 1855-1941), eldest daughter of George Smith, founder and publisher of the Dictionary of National Biography. ‘Dolly’ grew up at the heart of the Victorian world of letters: Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and George du Maurier were familiar figures.  Her father talked business with her “as though she were his son”. “But for the misfortune of her being a woman,” she recalled, he would have taken her into his publishing firm. He gave her the MS of Jane Eyre, and made over the Pall Mall Gazette to his son-in-law as a wedding present. (The journal’s politics promptly changed from Conservative to Liberal.)  Sixteen years her husband’s junior, ‘Dolly’ shared his interests in politics and art. She quietly claimed as her great-grandfather from Virginia one of the first Southerners to free his slaves, and became Henry’s equal in practical knowledge of book-making, fine printing, and binding — valuing skilled workmanship as much as the taste of the collector. From Portman Square in London and their Buckinghamshire estate, the Yates Thompsons hosted the intelligentsia of their day, including the Stracheys, Trevelyans, and Leslie Stephens. Among their unusually wide circle of American friends were Henry James and Henry Adams, Andrew and Louise Carnegie, Ruth Draper, and a succession of American Ministers to the Court of St James.

Henry Yates Thompson was a substantial benefactor of the British Museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as Newnham. Among the first to contribute to Henry Sidgwick’s scheme for the education of women, he and his wife later made gifts in equal measure.  Together they gave the College its original Library in 1897, and ten years later, the extension which nearly doubled the Library’s capacity.

A full list of their gifts to the College is recorded in the Library.

Jean Gooder, 2004

Further Reading

• Henry Yates Thompson, in the Dictionary of National Biography, E.G. Millar
• An Englishman in the American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry Yates Thompson, 1863, edited by Sir Christopher Chancellor. London, 1971 (Gift to the College Library)
• Elizabeth Robins, Portrait of a Lady, or The English Spirit Old and New, Hogarth Press, 1941; reprinted privately by Newnham College, 2002, to commemorate the building of the new Library.
• Was Henry Yates Thompson a Gentleman?, Christopher de Hamel, in Property of a Gentleman, ed R. Myers and M. Harris, Winchester, 1991.