Search FNL grants since 1931

a late autograph draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ celebrated poem 'Binsey Poplars'. The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ was the most significant Hopkins item to have come to the market in over forty years. 

The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by William, Percy and Sydney Spencer, three of the brothers of Stanley Spencer, the artist, mostly written to their sister Florence Image (aunt of Pamela, to whom they ultimately descended).

This volume from the library of William Beckford (1760-1844) is bound with the distinctive Beckford Fonthill binding, which combines two motifs from Beckford’s coat of arms on the spine. Tipped in to face the title-page is a fine wash drawing of Amiens Cathedral with the pencil note below: ‘after a finished Sketch by W[illiam] B[eckford]’. Beckford was known to have been in France during 1806, the year Rivoire’s work was published, and the intriguing notation to the sketch of the building found in this volume invites speculation as to whether he visited and recorded the building using this work as a guide.

The possibility of this visit is made more significant because in 1806 Beckford was immersed in the construction of his Gothic Revival masterpiece Fonthill Abbey.

Beckford’s Tower and Museum currently has twenty-four volumes once belonging to Beckford, fourteen of which have Fonthill bindings. The acquisition of this volume adds to this small but significant element of the museum’s collection, which is displayed in cabinets originally designed by Beckford and the architect of the Tower for that purpose.

The item was printed in Edinburgh by James Ballantyne. The full title is 'The Ettricke Garland: Being Two Excellent New Songs on the Lifting of the Banner of the House of Buccleugh at the great football match on Carterhaugh Dec. 4, 1815'. It is comprised of a poem by Scott, ‘The Lifting of the Banner’, and Hogg’s own tribute, ‘To the Ancient Banner of the House of Buccleuch’, and it is amongst the rarest of either Scott’s or Hogg’s titles.

An unpublished letter written by Joseph Priestley, the scientist and Unitarian theologian, from Northumberland, Pennsylvania, to his close friend Theophilus Lindsey in July 1794.

A group of six carefully selected books.

These eight pocket sized engagement diaries belonging to Virginia Woolf record in brief the author’s daily appointments. They directly complement the holdings within the Monks House Papers which were given to the University of Sussex in 1972.

One of the last letters written by Captain Robert Falcon Scott from his final camp in Antarctica was purchased by the Scott Polar Research Institute.

The Westmorland of Apethorpe Archive is of pre-eminent regional, national and international importance.  This status is confirmed both by its acceptance in lieu of tax and also by the fact that it is among the 120 estate and family archives that The National Archives considers to be the most sign

Captain Samuel Gurney Cresswell (1827-67), Arctic explorer and artist, and the first naval officer to cross the entire North-West Passage, is a major figure in the history of Arctic exploration. In Norfolk, he is regarded as one of the county’s great heroes.