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These objects are significant additions to the Jane Austen House collection, offering new insights into Jane Austen and her family and new avenues for research. The biography (dated c.1863) is written in the third person but is likely Francis Austen’s own account, describing his life and family relations as well as observations on historical events within his knowledge and impressions of the countries he visited. The album contains 73 topographical watercolours and drawings, mainly of the West Indies and Canada, made by Francis Austen and his daughter Cassandra Eliza Austen in the 1840s.

Australian-born Louise Dyer (1884-1962) first met Gustav Holst in 1924, a year which he spent mostly alone in Thaxted recovering from a serious nervous breakdown. Her detailed interest in and enthusiasm for his music helped kick-start the next stage of his career.It sheds significant new light both on the mutually supportive relationship between Dyer and Holst and on his development as a composer during the last decade of his life. Apparently unknown to Imogen Holst when she prepared her thematic catalogue of her father’s works for his 1974 centenary celebrations, this archive is a fitting and permanent celebration for 2024 – the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst’s birth.

Edward Lane joined his brother in London as an engraver, but abandoned that career owing to ill health. He learned Arabic and went to Egypt between 19 September 1825 and 7 April 1828. Based Cairo and made voyages up the Nile, in 1826 he went as far as the Second Cataract, and in 1827 with to Abu Simbel. LWhen he returned from Egypt he published Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. He was again in Egypt in 1849 compiling his great Arabic dictionary. Lane was the leading Arabic scholar of Europe, and although his works are primarily concerned with the modern Egyptians they are of great value to Egyptologists as he was closely associated with Hay and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875).

The archive sheds light on local life in the medieval and early modern era, between Greater Manchester’s better-known Roman and industrial revolution stories. It is an outstanding example of a medieval family archive with nationally important items relating to the English Civil War, the Middleton Bowmen, the Black Knight, and the royal court of the Plantagenets, as well as unique local history sources recording the local Middleton population. The collection contains some fascinating items including the earliest surviving written document, the 1197 Articles of Agreement which divided lands within the Assheton estate between Roger de Middleton and William de Radcliffe.

Hannah Brown (1866-1973) entered the care of the London Foundling Hospital in 1866 as her mother, Emma Johnson, as a single mother had few other options to care for her child. After leaving the Hospital, Brown entered domestic service before having a happy marriage and a career late in life as a self-taught artist. The hardships of her early life led her to campaign for vulnerable children. In 1922, she was invited to make a submission to a Parliamentary Select Committee looking into recommendations for the protection of adopted and other care-experienced children. In 1919, Brown published an anonymous memoir of her time at the Foundling Hospital under the name of ‘A Foundling’. Brown’s book is the only known first-hand account of a 19th-century foundling child.

Manuscript Book of Reference to the Maps of the Manors of St Donats and Sully and other Lands in the County of Glamorgan, the property of Thomas Drake Tyrwhitt Esquire. The survey covers land held at St Donats Manor as well as land in the parishes of Llantwit Major, Marcross, St Andrew and Sully.  Within the volume are recorded details of tenements and tenants, field names, acreages, cultivation and the total acreage of constituent parts of the estate.

The Carnations manuscript provides a fascinating, personal insight into early 18th-century floristry and religious belief, from shoemaker and amateur botanist, Richard Hammond. The museum is rich in papers from the 19th- and early 20th-century botanical and horticultural clubs but material is very sparse from the 1700s. There is relatively little information about early florists and few records exist detailing the societies to which they belonged. As such, this manuscript is incredibly rare and invaluable in illuminating this period of the history of horticulture in Britain and beyond.

This single letter ties Thomas Hardy’s career as a budding architect to one of the key Dorset structures on which he is known to have worked.  Athelhampton church, located some four miles east of Dorchester close to the elegant country house of the same name, was constructed in 1861-62.  The plans for the church in Hardy’s own hand were purchased by Dorset History Centre in 2022 with substantial support from the FNL.

Georgina Hogarth (1827-1917) is one of the most intriguing, yet little known, women of the Victorian age both in relation to her brother-in-law, the great writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870), but also in her own right as a single woman navigating the social constraints of the age to forge and maintain a stable position for herself. Georgina moved into the Dickens household aged just 15 as lively company for the young family and to help her older sister, Catherine, in the running of the household. Over a period of nearly 30 years, Dickens and Georgina shared a home and became close friends. When the Dickens’s marriage failed and Charles and Catherine separated, Georgina remained with Dickens as ‘servant housekeeper’ but also as confidante and advisor, a role she maintained until Dickens’s death in 1870.

The Manor of Duffield Fee was a unique institution in the county. It was in effect a collection of manors under the ownership of one lord, which were managed as one administrative unit (the Fee); the manors or sub-manors lying within the Fee were Alderwasley, Belper, Biggin, Duffield, Heage, Holbrook, Hulland, Idridgehay, Southwood, Turnditch and Windley.  The Lords of the Manor of Duffield Fee have included the Duchy of Lancaster (1399-1628), the Corporation of London (1628-1629), the Leche/Leech family (1629-1673), Sir Ambrose Phillips (1674-1678), the Jodrell family (1678-1891) and the White family of Salle Park, Norfolk (from 1891). A substantial portion of the Duffield Fee lies within the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, where Sir Richard Arkwright established the first water-powered cotton mills along the river. Predating the establishment of the mills by 175 years, the Duffield Fee manorial records therefore document land ownership and use in the pre- and post-industrial landscape.