In 1850–1, three Royal Commissions were set up to enquire into the state of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin (the Scottish universities having been the subject of a similar commission two decades earlier). Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, where recommendations for far-reaching reforms were proposed, Trinity and its Library emerged relatively unscathed, and the Commission's recommendations regarding the Library generally coincided with the views expressed by the less conservative members of the College community. All three reports covered the university libraries in some detail. Those for Dublin and Cambridge provided statistical information, but that for Oxford contained few figures about the Bodleian.

The total number of volumes in Trinity was about 105,000, which made it larger than Edinburgh and Glasgow (both of which had around 70,000) but considerably smaller than Cambridge (170,000) and the Bodleian (220,000). The libraries were reported as growing at significantly different rates, the Bodleian at between 6,000 and 7,000 volumes a year, Cambridge at about 5,000 and Trinity at only 1,500 to 2,000. The figure quoted for Trinity is initially puzzling, as the number of items received from Stationers’ Hall was considerably larger than that, comprising about 3,500 ‘articles’, as Todd described them; in addition, approximately 750 volumes a year were acquired by purchase or donation. Although many of the ‘volumes’ received by legal deposit were pamphlets, which were eventually to be bound together, often more than twenty to a volume, and would subsequently be counted as a single item, there is still a considerable discrepancy between the two figures. Todd explained this as being due partly to the cataloguing backlog that he had inherited and partly to those legal-deposit books ‘deemed too insignificant to be placed in the Library’.