Ted Simonds (SAS) - 2025-26 Students
edward.simonds@london.ac.uk

The Mount Street Catalogues: Reconstructing a Nineteenth-Century Jesuit Library

This collaborative project aims to reconstruct and recontextualize the historic library of the Jesuits in Britain at 114 Mount Street, London, highlighting its historical, cultural, and global significance. Established in the mid-nineteenth century, the Mount Street library, which is now preserved by the British Jesuit Archives, originally boasted a diverse array of books across literature, history, poetry, and theology. However, significant portions of this collection were deaccessioned, as over time other books were acquired from elsewhere, changing the scope, purpose and overall character of the library.

This project leverages two unexplored nineteenth century manuscript catalogues—dating from the 1850s and 1890s respectively— to better understand the evolving nature of Jesuit book collecting in London over the nineteenth century.

Principal supervisor: Dr Michael Durrant

Supervisor at Partner Organisation: Dr Lucy Vinten, Assistant Archivist and Rare Book Cataloguer

Partner Organisation: Brtish Jesuit Archives