Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780 - 1862)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English theologian and librarian. Horne was initially affiliated with the Wesleyans but later joined the Church of England. He was admitted to holy orders without the usual preliminaries, because of his published work. In 1833 he obtained a benefice in London and a prebend in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Horne was a librarian in 1814 at the Surrey Institution, which was dissolved in 1823.He was admitted sizar to St John’s College, Cambridge in 1819. In 1824 he joined the staff at the British Museum and was senior assistant in the printed books department there until 1860. He prepared a new system for cataloguing books at the museum but it was never used there. He did use it, however, to reclassify the extensive library of Frances Mary Richardson Currer in 1833.

Horne wrote more than forty works in bibliography, Bible commentaries, and Christian apologetics. One of his best known works is the three-volume Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818).