Edward Vernon Utterson: Fareham’s Antiquary and Private Printer

Edward Vernon Utterson was born in Fareham in 1775 or 1776, the eldest son of John Utterson of Fareham. He went on to become a lawyer, antiquary, book collector and one of the more unusual literary figures connected with the town.

He was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1802. His legal career was successful: in 1815 he became one of the Six Clerks in Chancery, an old and prestigious office in the Court of Chancery, which he held until the post was abolished in 1842.

His real passion, however, was old books.

Utterson collected rare English literature and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1807. In 1812 he was one of the original members of the Roxburghe Club, one of the earliest societies devoted to collecting and privately publishing rare books. He also edited collections of early English poetry, preserving works that were already difficult to find.

Later in life he moved to the Isle of Wight and established his own private printing operation at Beldornie Tower in Ryde. The Beldornie Press specialised in reprinting extremely rare works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. The editions were extraordinarily exclusive: some were printed in only twelve, fifteen or sixteen copies. A surviving copy of Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia, printed there in 1841, records that only sixteen copies were produced.

His work was valuable, although contemporaries sometimes complained that the reprints contained transcription errors. Even so, Utterson helped preserve texts that might otherwise have remained inaccessible to later scholars.

Utterson died on 14 July 1856, aged about eighty. Although he spent much of his adult life elsewhere, he was brought back to Fareham for burial.

His connection with St Peter & St Paul gives Fareham an unexpected link with the nineteenth-century world of antiquarians, private libraries and rare-book collecting. Among the soldiers, sailors and benefactors remembered around the church is a man whose passion was preserving England’s literary past.