GladCAT is the end result of a three year AHRC funded research project to identify and catalogue the books personally owned by William Ewart Gladstone. It aims to provide an electronic research resource that will be invaluable not just for Gladstone scholars, but for all students of nineteenth century literature and culture, as well as historians of the book and of reading.

The first stage of the project was to create an electronic catalogue of all holdings at St Deiniol’s, replacing the card index system previously used. GladCAT is a separate online catalogue which centres only on Gladstone’s ‘Foundation Collection’ of some 32,000 items. Many of these – like Gladstone’s copies of works by Dante, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Newman, and Tennyson - contain his own annotations and are irreplaceable. Gladstone is a major political, historical and cultural figure yet until now no separate catalogue of his personal library has existed.

GladCAT will provide a database both of Gladstone’s books and contain extensive details of his annotations. It is hoped that this will facilitate numerous research projects currently impossible because of the lack of a clear body of knowledge, i.e. research by scholars interested in Gladstone’s reading, as well as by literary and cultural historians interested in reading practices, the nineteenth-century ‘reading experience’, and libraries as cultural institutions. These are dynamic and relatively new areas of cultural investigation, and no other project in the world offers such an insight into the habits of an individual reader over so many years and across so many volumes. Furthermore, GladCAT’s availability online (subject to password protection) will enable it to reach a global audience.

The project to identify Gladstone’s books and create GladCAT began in 2006, with Dr Juliet John as principal investigator. Initially, the postdoctoral researcher on the project was Dr Mark Llewellyn, succeeded in 2007 by Dr Matthew Bradley. In January 2008 Dr Karen McDonaugh-Nicholls, who had originally been working as a cataloguer on the project, began working exclusively on GladCAT.

GladCAT will be officially launched in January 2009. If you have any questions/enquiries about the database, please email Matthew Bradley