And Margaret, With Apologies

I've said little or nothing about Margaret Floyd Wilkinson, Emma's younger sister and the editor of the Autobiography. We know little about Margaret. As I've suggested in earlier posts, it appears that Margaret was sent to live with her elder sister Frances and Frances' husband on Ebenezer's death, and that she did not rejoin Ann Sophia and Emma in London, even when Emma managed to pull herself up into the lower echelons of respectability in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Margaret did live briefly with Emma in the 1870s, in both London (on Vassal Terrace) and in Boston, after her marriage to Gilbert Wilkinson, a private secretary.

In the issues of the Unseen Universe, however, we get a glimpse or two of Margaret; she is a contributor to UU on a number of occasions, and her byline includes the cryptic phrase, "Foreign Librarian, Manchester".

It appears that Margaret, from the 1880s onward until 1903, was the (head?) librarian for the Manchester Foreign Library (1830-1903), which specialized in French, German, Italian and other Continental texts.

At its dissolution in 1903, the Library held 16,000 volumes -- no mean size for a privately endowed library. The MFL was of interest to both the Martineaus (James in particular) and the Gaskells, and was generally considered to have the finest collection of German literature in Great Britain. Members paid 3 guineas to join, and an annual subscription each year thereafter to support the library's operation. Its most famous subscriber -- depending on your perspective -- was either Elizabeth Gaskell or (be still my beating heart) a certain F. Engels, son of a local manufacturer.

Margaret is not listed as a librarian in the 1881 UK census, is listed as such in the 1891 census, and in 1893, she is bylined as such.

The library closed in 1903, unable to sustain its operations. Margaret died in 1912. One wonders if she stayed on until the end of that institution, and what the last 9 years of her life were like.