Nat Gould

Thomas Hollis 1720-1774

Thomas Hollis was born in London on 14 April 1720, the only child of Thomas Hollis and his wife nee Sarah Scott.

He was a major benefactor of Harvard College in Massachusetts, which later became Harvard University. He was an unmarried eccentric who lived principally in Lincoln’s Inn in London, although he had a country house at Corscombe in Dorset. In his relatively short life he packed in an astonishing amount of literary activity (1).

He inherited two large family fortunes while still in his teens. Instead of following in the family business, he was tutored in classics and modern languages and studied law at Lincoln’s Inn for six years. Then he spent another six years travelling in Europe from Scandinavia to Malta, Poland and Vienna. This prepared him for a radical life devoted to religious and political freedom. He sought out appropriate books, had them sumptuously bound, and donated them anonymously to people and institutions all over Europe. But his benefactions to Harvard were made under his own name and on an entirely grander scale.

In 1764 a serious fire destroyed nearly all the books in the great Harvard Library. Academically minded people immediately began donating books and money to replace the lost collections. However the replacement would have been a very slow process but for the generosity of Thomas Hollis. Over the next ten years he transhipped thousands of volumes to Harvard, including carefully selected works of scholarship and classical antiquity, as well as agriculture, medicine, geology and other scientific studies, but above all books on government, which he regarded as being especially important.. “If government goeth well, all goeth well” he said. His aim in America was to educate and assist the development of “scholars, the noblest of men”.

The harassed Harvard librarian could barely cope with this vast flow of books and he was unable to keep accurate inventories of what had been sent. Precisely what he received is still unknown, although books that Hollis donated are still widely used.
At his death he bequeathed £500 as a fund for the continued purchase of books.

Thomas Hollis inserted cautionary or instructive notes into some of the books he donated. In a few he inserted his own book plate which he had personally designed. It proudly proclaimed him to be an Englishman, a Member of Lincoln’s Inn, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London.

He died on New Year’s Day 1774, unmarried and childless. He bequeathed his estate to his friend Thomas Brand of The Hyde, Ingatestone in Essex, who took the name of Thomas Brand Hollis.

Thomas Brand Hollis lived from 1719 to 1804 and devoted his life to the American revolutionary cause. He was a personal friend of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin. At one time he was wrongly regarded as co-author with William Godwin (father-in-law of the poet Shelley) of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, but he did in fact commission the portrait of Paine from which prints were made for the 1791 edition of that book. Paine entrusted the key of the Bastille to him for presenting to George Washington as a symbol of Franco-American solidarity.

He had been elected in 1783 to the newly established Academy of Arts and Sciences in New England, and had their degree of Doctor of Laws conferred on him in 1787. He was also a friend of Mirabeau, the first leader of the French Revolution in 1789. In England Thomas Brand Hollis tried to introduce law reform to bring about greater liberty both within and outside the Church of England, and pressed for parliamentary reform and a more enlightened colonial policy.

(1) "The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln's Inn" The William and Mary Quarterly Caroline Robbins volume 7 number 3 (July, 1950) pages 406-453. Boswell called him "strenuous" and Johnson called him a Whig.