Nationality British Known for founder of a library | Name Enriqueta Rylands Spouse John Rylands | |
Born 31 May 1843 Havana Died February 4, 1908, Torquay, United Kingdom | ||
Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (31 May 1843 – 4 February 1908) was the founder of the John Rylands Library, Manchester.
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Early life
Enriqueta Augustina was born in Havana, Cuba, and was one of five children including José Esteban (later Stephen Joseph, who was her twin brother), Blanca Catalina and Leocadia Fernanda. Her father was Stephen Cattley Tennant (1800–1848), a merchant whose family came from Yorkshire, and her mother, Juana Camila Dalcour (1818–1855).
Tennant retired to Liverpool, but died within a year. His widow migrated to Paris and married pianist and polymath Julian Fontana. Juana and Julian had one son, Enriqueta's half brother, Julian (Jules) Camillo Adam Fontana, who was born in 1853. Enriqueta Tennant was raised a Roman Catholic and completed her education in New York, London and Paris. In later life she abandoned Catholicism and became a Congregationalist, under the influence of the Rev. Thomas Raffles (1788–1863).
At Longford Hall, Stretford
Some time after 1860, Enriqueta became companion to Martha, the wife of wealthy Manchester merchant John Rylands whose residence was Longford Hall in Stretford. She joined the congregation of Cavendish Congregational Church, Chorlton-on-Medlock. In 1875, eight months after Martha's death, Enriqueta married John Rylands, then aged 74. The ceremony was held in Kensington, London, on 6 October. The marriage was childless but two children were adopted: Arthur Forbes (a cousin of Enriqueta) and Maria Castiglioni. When John Rylands died in 1888, Enriqueta as the inheritor of most of his estate of £2,574,922 became a major shareholder of his family firm and in the Manchester Ship Canal.
The Rylands Library
In memory of her husband, Enriqueta founded the John Rylands Library. She admired the design of Basil Champneys's library for Mansfield College, Oxford, and contracted him to develop something similar, on a more lavish scale. She secretly negotiated the purchase of the 2nd Earl Spencer's library which had been built up by Thomas Dibdin which the 5th Earl Spencer put up for sale in 1892. The library purchase was for the record price of £210,000 and she commissioned the Manchester academic Alice Margaret Cooke to index it.
The library was inaugurated on 6 October 1899, the anniversary of her marriage. On the same day, she was admitted to the Freedom of the City of Manchester, the first woman to be so honoured. She was committed to many philanthropic and missionary causes and bequeathed much of her wealth to educational and medical institutions (including the Victoria University of Manchester and the library she had founded). She received the honorary degree Doctor of Literature (D.Litt.) from the Victoria University of Manchester in February 1902, in connection with the 50th jubilee celebrations of the establishment of Owens College.
In 1901, Mrs Rylands paid £155,000 for more than 6,000 manuscripts owned by James Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford of Haigh Hall. The Bibliotheca Lindesiana was one of the most impressive private collections in Britain at the time, both for its size and rarity of some of its contents.
Later life
In later life she was affected by rheumatic symptoms and spent frequent periods convalescing overseas. In 1894, she purchased a villa in Torquay where she died 14 years later. Following her funeral in Stretford, Manchester, she was cremated and the ashes interred in the vault where her husband had been buried twenty years earlier in the Southern Cemetery, Manchester.