Search FNL grants since 1931

This collection was acquired to complement the principal Hardy archive, which is now on deposit at Dorset History Centre. It represents a major addition to the publicly-accessible Hardy archives and provides a fascinating insight into Hardy’s professional circle, his personal circumstances and his views and beliefs on a range of subjects. The material is made up of 46 separate elements, some of which contain multiple items. The bulk of the material was acquired between 1920 and 1970 and held as a single collection until this sale.

The account book belonged to William Walrond (1610-c.1667), a member of the Walrond family of Bradfield House, near Uffculme in mid Devon, and provides an unusually detailed insight into the operation of a significant country estate during the years following the English Civil War.

Maureen Selley, Secretary, writes:   The North Devon Record Office in Barnstaple, Devon, holds some material relating to the North Devon Infirmary, but it has no list of subscribers or benefactors in its collections.

This rare first edition of William Cowper’s Poems, published in 1782, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight and was very likely read by Austen herself during her visits to her brother’s Kent estate. Edward inherited the estates of Chawton in Hampshire and Godmersham Park from wealthy relatives of his father; when he was made heir he took the name of Knight.

A collection of autograph letters from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Sir Nevill Francis Mott (Director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and Master of Gonville & Caius College) to Yvette Cauchois, a highly eminent physicist who became the second woman (after Marie Curie) to be President of the French Society for Physical Chemistry.

The book in itself is not a rare edition of Smith; the value for research lies in the presentation of the copy. It is interleaved and contains over 180 pages of manuscript notes by a student attending a series of lectures given by Robert Malthus to students at the Haileybury East India College, which trained administrators for the Honourable East India Company.

A scarce tract printed at the Danish Mission in Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in 1721, an early example of printing in the Tamil language.

Dr Alexander Lock, Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts, writes: John Donne (1572–1631) was one of the most popular poets of the late 16th and early 17th centuries and is considered to be one of the greatest Renaissance writers in the English canon.

Made around the year 1500, this manuscript contains the most complete collection of the works of Lewis of Caerleon, an astronomer and physician to the household of King Henry VII of England. Loyal to the Tudor cause, Lewis had been imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. This manuscript includes his astronomical observations, some of which were made from the Tower itself.
Acquired under export regulations.

Mary Shelley’s ‘The Invisible Girl’ was published in The Keepsake annual for 1833, described as being ‘by the Author of Frankenstein’. The manuscript consists of four pages of autograph manuscript text, with autograph revisions throughout, paginated 5 to 8 (single bifolium, 230 x 185mm). The manuscript has the lower portion of the second leaf cut away, but there is no apparent loss of text.