Enriqueta Augustina Tennant Rylands was a United Kingdom philanthropist, who is famous for establishing in her late husband's name one of the most impressive collections of medieval manuscripts and theological rarities in the United Kingdom. Her legacy to English literature, the John Rylands Library, opened in Manchester in 1900.
Background
Ethnicity:
Enriqueta Augustina Tennant Rylands is of French and Scottish ethnicity.
Enriqueta Augustina Rylands, maiden name Tennant, was born on 31 May 1843 in Havana, Cuba. She was one of the five children, including José Esteban (later Stephen Joseph, who was her twin brother), Blanca Catalina and Leocadia Fernanda, of Stephen Cattley Tennant, a partner in a Liverpool mercantile firm, and Juana Camila Dalcour. Enriqueta's family had built up huge wealth trading in land and sugar, profiting from slavery and the exploitation of indigenous peoples in the southern states of America and in Cuba.
When Enriqueta was five, her life changed dramatically. On a business trip to the United Kingdom in 1848, her father died in a railway accident. The following year, his unnamed heirs were registered as British slave-owners in Havana. They owned an unknown number of "house slaves," who were "hired out" - rented to other slaveholders for a profit. It is likely that their mother also owned slaves independently of her husband, but as she wasn't a British subject she wasn't included in the report. In 1850, Enriqueta's Cuban childhood came to an end. Juana Dalcour sailed with her daughters for New York (her son would join them later). There she married Julian Fontana, the pianist and Polish exile she had met in Havana. The family moved to Paris, living among radicals and artists. But they were still living from the proceeds of slavery, apparently receiving an income from Juana's share in the sugar plantation and mill, La Reunion Deseada. When Juana died in 1855, Enriqueta and her twin were 12. The widowed Fontana went to Cuba where he tried and failed, to seek Juana's inheritance. Enriqueta's sixteen-year-old sister Sofia died there in 1859. The younger children, including her half-brother Jules Fontana, were sent to live with members of the Tennant family in the United Kingdom.
Education
As a "white creole" in Cuba, Enriqueta Rylands was born into wealth and privilege. By her teens, she was in a precarious position both financially and socially. In Victorian Britain, creole heiresses were subject to racial discrimination even while they were tolerated for their wealth. She attended a convent school in New York (which is supposed to have been a Roman Catholic one) and finished schools in London and Paris. Those years were formative of her character and her disposition: they left a deep imprint upon her personality and they transformed her attitude towards her inherited faith. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Victoria University of Manchester.
Miss Enriqueta Tennant arrived in Manchester in the early 1860s and became the companion of Martha, second wife of John Rylands, who had established his country seat at Longford Hall, Stretford, in 1857. After the death of Martha Rylands, John Rylands and Enriqueta were married. She gave new impetus to her husband's philanthropic activities and co-operated closely in the publication of his Paragraph Bible and his hymn-books. He paid to print Bibles, for instance, and distributed them to the public; he did the same with hymnals, such as The Cavendish Hymnal from 1864 and Hymns of the Church Universal. In Two Parts. I. The Spirit of the Psalms. II. General Hymns, printed in 1885 with her name on the title page. After her husband's death, Enriqueta Rylands kept donating copies of this hymnal to the poor. When John Rylands died in December 1888, leaving a fortune of over £2.5 million, Enriqueta was his main legatee and chief executor. She also became the chief shareholder in Manchester's two leading firms, Rylands & Sons Ltd and the Manchester Ship Canal Company, and she took an active role in the management of the former.
Enriqueta Rylands commemorated her husband by the creation of the John Rylands Library. In 1889, Basil Champneys was appointed as architect, and on 6 October 1899 (John and Enriqueta's wedding anniversary), it was ready for its opening ceremony, though general readers were not admitted until January 1, 1900. Many of the Rylands Library's rarities were on display, including ten bibles in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a collection of seventy-four different types of bookbinding. The library took ten years instead of the original estimate of three to complete, and also cost three times as much as the original estimate, £224,086 (at least £50 million in modern terms) against £78,000. It was fireproof, and one of the first public buildings lit by electricity. Its original wiring remained until 1994.
Rylands hired Edward Gordon Duff in 1893 as a librarian. Duff issued The Catalogue of the Printed Books and Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, Manchester in 1899. That same year, Henry Guppy became a partner to Duff for the job. The differences of opinion with Mrs. Rylands caused Duff to resign shortly after the opening of the Rylands Library, and Guppy was then the sole librarian. Rylands planned for a board to run the library, and its mission statement read, in part, that the "Rylands Library is intended to afford free access for Scholars, Authors, Students and serious readers generally, to the best Literature of the ancient and modern world, especially in the departments of Theology, Philosophy, the Moral Sciences and Universal History."
Rylands began acquiring books for the Library in 1889. She bought modern reference works in a variety of subjects, with an emphasis on theology, and soon began purchasing special items. Her purchase of the Spencer collection of printed books in 1892, transformed the Library into a scholarly institution of international status. The Library was administered as an independent institution by a Council of Governors and a Board of Trustees.
After the Library opened, Enriqueta Rylands continued to support the Governors in acquiring books for the Library but also purchased books for her private library at Longford Hall, which contained collections of hymns translated from the early Greek and Latin, others dating from the Middle Ages, and still others that were significant to the early years of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. In 1901, she purchased the Crawford Collection of Western, Near Eastern, and Far Eastern manuscripts. These manuscripts were part of the private library she bequeathed to her foundation when she died in 1908. Enriqueta Rylands also helped compile a two-volume catalog of her husband's manuscript that dates from 1881.
Enriqueta Rylands also continued her husband's manuscript acquisitions, boosting the library's collection. Advised by the Reverend Samuel Gosnell Green and his son, John Arnold Green, she began to purchase many books on theology. The younger Green helped arrange the transactions with English booksellers and dealers in antiquities since Rylands wished to conceal her identity. The one acquisition on which they agreed was the Althorp Library. The sale of this treasure in 1892 to Rylands by the fifth Earl Spencer, John Poyntz Spencer (the ninth earl, Charles Spencer, is the brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales), was a coup for the Rylands Library. George John Spencer, the second Earl Spencer, had founded the Althorp Library and its 43,000 volumes included a great collection of very early printed Bibles. An American collector had reportedly offered £300,000, but Rylands and Green paid £210,000 and the treasure remained in the United Kingdom. It was shipped in 600 special boxes over three months from Northamptonshire to Manchester on farm wagons and railroad cars. The transaction was ultimately leaked to the media, and the Manchester Guardian identified Rylands as the Althorp Library buyer. In 1901, she and her agents acquired a second significant collection, that of the Earl of Crawford, from a manor house called Haigh Hall.
In 1972, the John Rylands Library merged with the Library of Manchester University to form the John Rylands University Library (JRUL) of Manchester, the third-largest academic library in the United Kingdom. In 2012, the JRUL changed its name to The University of Manchester Library. The original John Rylands Library building now houses the Special Collections Division of The University of Manchester Library.
A full-length statue of Enriqueta Rylands, by a sculptor John Cassidy, was unveiled on December 9, 1907. At the ceremonial inauguration of the statue (which Mrs. Rylands was too ill to attend) the Vice-Chancellor of the Victoria University, Professor Alfred Hopkinson, said that they owed her a great debt, not only for endowing the library but also for her generosity in "filling it with those treasures which could only be got by lavish and princely generosity and by direct personal care and interest in the work." Manchester thanked Enriqueta Rylands with the keys to the city. She was the first woman ever to receive such an honor.
Enriqueta Rylands was a very religious woman - she took the Bible seriously.
Personality
Enriqueta Rylands was a very good negotiator because she was passionate about people and about doing the right thing. She was also extremely kind - and that she engaged on a personal level with everyone she met.
Connections
Enriqueta Tennant married John Rylands, an industrialist and book collector, on October 6, 1875. The wedding took place in Kensington Congregational Church, where John Marshall acted as officiating minister: the witnesses were Stephen Joseph Tennant, the twin brother of Enriqueta, and John Rylands, a partner in the firm of Rylands Brothers, wire manufacturers of Warrington. The couple adopted two children: Arthur Forbes and Maria Castiglinoli. Enriqueta Rylands had a troubled relationship with her adopted daughter.
Father:
Stephen Cattley Tennant
Stephen Cattley Tennant (1800-1848) was a United Kingdom merchant from a Leeds family, with a shipping business in Liverpool. In his 20s, he moved to Havana, Cuba, to look after his family's business interests. Like most trans-Atlantic merchants, the family profited from sugar, cotton, tobacco, and timber - goods produced by the labor of enslaved people.
John Rylands left the majority of his wealth and his shares to Enriqueta. With her husband, Enriqueta Rylands had always shared a profound community of purpose and an essential kinship of soul. They spent their time together donating to many charitable and philanthropic causes and this was a legacy Enriqueta was determined to carry on. She was inspired by the library at Mansfield College which had been designed by Basil Champneys and she commissioned the architect to build a library on Deansgate in memory of her husband. She also continued John Rylands' passion for acquiring sacred music, early printed Bibles, and other religious-themed treasures until her own death.
Brother:
Stephen Joseph Tennant
Stephen Joseph Tennant (1843-1914, born José Esteban Tennant) was a clerk to a merchant and general agent to his uncle Edward Tennant. Later he became a commercial correspondent around 1871, a commercial clerk around 1881, and a foreign correspondent around 1891. By 1901, he had risen to a director, cotton manufacturer, general warehouseman, and exporter. Stephen Tennant was an original trustee, life governor, and honorary treasurer of the John Rylands Library. He was also a trustee of his sister's huge estate upon her death in 1908.
