Skip to main content
Senate House Library

Crofton Collection

The unifying feature of the Crofton Collection is the size of its 296 books, which are all little (but not miniature), typically from 12 to 14 centimetres in height.

Several books are attractively bound. English and French literature, especially poetry, of the eighteenth century predominates, and several texts are present in multiple editions: for example, Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s Virgil, Cowper’s poems, Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas, and Thompson’s Seasons. There is also some devotional and travel literature.

Most of the titles are in English, with one quarter in French. The French element of the collection is marked by late editions of seventeenth-century works, notably by the great French playwrights, Corneille, Racine, and Molière, alongside the eighteenth-century writers Florian, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and by translations of classics from several other languages: the works of Salomon Gessner, Don Quixote, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.

Sixty-four per cent of the titles were printed in the first half of the nineteenth century, with another 27 per cent emanating from the second half of the eighteenth century. They are re-issues and editorially insignificant editions which precisely because they are not landmark issues are scarce in academic libraries.

The books were collected by Cecil Frederick Crofton (1859-1935; real name Frederick Martin), an actor, especially of comic roles, whose theatrical heyday was 1882-1896. He donated them in 1932. Several items contain his pictorial bookplate, in one of two separate designs.

Access

For an overview of the library, do a mixed classmark search on [C.C.] or an author search on “Crofton, Cecil” as former owner.

Related materials

  • MS1009, Biographical scrapbook of Cecil Crofton
  • MS1231, Biographical scrapbook of Cecil Crofton

Further reading

Caudwell, James, ‘The Forgotten Cecil Crofton’, FULLview, 22 (Dec. 2003), 13-17
https://www.london.ac.uk/about/services/senate-house-library/collections/printed-special-collections/crofton-collection
www.london.ac.uk
CC-MAIN-2023-50
533985
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:247KYIUO3LP7NUPBNPQ46XYXTEXF4OYZ
<urn:uuid:27a9befc-5b60-4668-adec-dde72668d187>
2023-12-11T00:29:30Z
151.101.2.216
text/html
sha1:CW2XYXAL7WDOWKLGNJB5RUPXOSFB2U6H
<urn:uuid:82dcf725-b1e9-49f8-a6ac-cef55e480e29>
https://www.london.ac.uk/about/services/senate-house-library/collections/printed-special-collections/crofton-collection
response
<urn:uuid:f271b190-fef9-40a0-98e0-382cf0019cae>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-11
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/