The life and times of Thomas Claggett, first bishop of Maryland and the first bishop consecrated in America
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George Burwell Utley was an American librarian. He was a published author, first director of the Jacksonville Public Library (Florida) and librarian of the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois.
Background
George Burwell Utley was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of George Tyler Utley, a businessman, and Harriet Ella (Burwell) Utley. His father, a descendant of Samuel Utley, who arrived from England about 1647 and eventually settled in Stonington, Connecticut, was for many years the secretary of the Connecticut railroad commission. Before young George was three, his mother died and he was sent to live with her maiden sisters at their ancestral home in Pleasant Valley, twenty-five miles from Hartford.
Education
He prepared for college at the Vermont Academy, near Brattleboro, and after graduating in 1895 entered Colgate, but transferred after one year to Brown, where he prepared himself to teach English literature and received a Ph. B. degree in 1899.
Career
While waiting for a suitable teaching offer, Utley worked in the office of an insurance company in Hartford and frequented the Watkinson Library. Within a few weeks the librarian, Frank B. Gay, who was looking for an assistant, persuaded him to give up business records for books. Thus Utley entered upon a career of librarianship.
In 1901 he went to Baltimore to become librarian of the Maryland Diocesan Library of the Protestant Episcopal church, a choice collection of nearly 30, 000 volumes of incunabula, theology, and local history. Its resources soon inspired him to write a series of papers on its rare books and, though Utley was a Baptist, to carry out research in its manuscript sources that eventually led to his volume The Life and Times of Thomas John Clagett, First Bishop of Maryland (1913).
In 1905 he was appointed librarian of the nearly completed Carnegie Library at Jacksonville, Fla. The ability he displayed in organizing the library and his continued success in extending its services made his name known outside the state.
Six years later the American Library Association chose him as its executive secretary, and Utley moved to Chicago in 1911. The association, founded in 1876, had had no fixed headquarters until 1906, when one was set up in Boston. Not until 1909, when the Chicago Public Library provided free office space, could a definite program be envisioned. Utley found a two-year-old administrative organization operating with a sketchy plan. Quietly and efficiently he established the headquarters on a firm basis and guided its development along two lines: fieldwork, which included making speeches to state and regional meetings in order to increase membership, and work at headquarters, which encompassed publicity and publishing.
From 1917 to 1920, while continuing as executive secretary, he gave his chief attention to duties as secretary of the association's Library War Service Committee, which, working in Washington, D. C. , collected and distributed the "largest library in the world" for the armed forces during World War I and the period of demobilization.
Utley returned to Chicago after the war with an established reputation as an able administrator and a man of marked bibliographic tastes. In 1920 he was offered the librarianship of the Newberry Library. Acceptance meant continuing to live in Chicago, an idea by no means displeasing to the transplanted Connecticut Yankee of Republican party persuasion, who had come to love the city and felt proud of its literary and artistic creations, although he sometimes lamented the lack both of good government and of genuine "respect for law and order" (Utley to John M. Stahl, June 20, 1929, Allan Nevins Collection, Columbia University). Utley accepted the appointment and remained at the Newberry Library for nearly twenty-three years.
Utley found time to deliver papers and write articles on librarianship, books, and bibliography, including ten for the Dictionary of American Biography. He served, too, as the president of several organizations, among them Chicago's Geographic Society (1929 - 1931), Literary Club (1935 - 1936), and Writers' Guild (1935 - 1936). Although flattered by election to the presidency of the American Library Association (1922 - 1923), he discovered the burden to be anything but light, and with memories of the battle over international copyright especially fresh in mind, confided at the end of his term, "I feel relief from the responsibility" (Utley to Richard R. Bowker, May 24, 1923, Bowker Papers, New York Public Library). He celebrated the organization's semicentennial in his graceful and informative Fifty Years of the American Library Association (1926).
In 1941 the Newberry Library trustees voted to adopt the sixty-five-year retirement policy prevailing in a large number of universities, and Utley, who had recovered from a slight heart attack in 1938, retired on September 1, 1942. He occupied himself with reading and buying books (he collected the works of Robert Louis Stevenson), stamp collecting, and gardening. He enjoyed traveling by car in annual trips to Winter Park, Fla. , and in the summer to Connecticut. He suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of sixty-nine while puttering in his garden in Pleasant Valley, Connecticut, and was buried in nearby Riverside Cemetery.
Achievements
During his incumbency at the Newberry Library, the library's holdings rose to 180, 000 carefully selected volumes that earned it fame as a rich store of source materials in English and American literature as well as American history. The library's genealogical collection and its John M. Wing Foundation, devoted to the history of painting, were also augmented, and the staff grew from thirty-three to forty-five members.
His first published and perhaps best known work was "The Life and Times of Thomas John Claggett, First Bishop of Maryland and the First Bishop Consecrated in America".
