Grants awarded in 2020

Jeremy Mitchell, Chair of the Edward Thomas Fellowship and a Trustee of Petersfield Museum, writes: Since 2017 an extensive and important collection (gifted by the family of the late Tim Wilton-Steer) of over 2,000 books and other items, including some letters, by and about the early 20th-century lit

A beautifully annotated copy of Aesop’s fables which, quite probably, was used and read at the college nearly five hundred years ago. Foremost among the many reasons to celebrate the return to Queens’ of this volume is its status as testimony to the humanist spirit that flourished at the college during the Tudor era.…

The Andersonian Naturalists’ Society, founded in 1885, is amongst the earliest student societies at the University of Strathclyde. The purchase of these albums has helped us fill a clear gap in the University Archives – we had no photographs amongst our records of the Society and, furthermore, no records of the Society at all before 1930.

The book in itself is not a rare edition of Smith; the value for research lies in the presentation of the copy.…

During 2020 FNL received an exceptional, restricted gift in kind, with a value of £500,000, from the Chatsworth Settlement in the form of The Book of Lismore, a 15th century medieval Irish decorated manuscript and considered one of the Great Books of Ireland.…

Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) is one of the most influential scientists of the last two centuries. His ground-breaking Principles of Geology (1830-33) showed that the earth is not shaped by sudden catastrophic events but by slow-moving forces, like erosion and sedimentation, that we can still see in action today.…

Autograph letter to his sister, Ada, and postcards to his niece. Although Lawrence was a prolific letter writer and over 5,500 letters are published in the Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 8 vols., 1979-2000), comparatively few letters and postcards to family members have survived.…

The conduct of services is the primary function of York Minster, the mother church of the Northern Province, and the records of those services are, therefore, of prime importance for the study of its history, the history of the province and the history of the wider Church in England.…

Four letters and a poem of Robert Burns. NLS has one of the most comprehensive collections of Burns manuscripts to be found anywhere in the world, and the addition of these manuscripts greatly complements our collections.…

Edward Backhouse (1808-1879), prominent member of the well-known Quaker family, was born in Darlington but moved to Sunderland in 1816. He was a partner in the family banking business, Backhouse & Co (a founding company of Barclays Bank), but mainly engaged in philanthropic activities.…

A rare and fascinating volume containing two editions of Josuah [Joshua] Sylvester’s mourning poetry for Prince Henry. The volume contains the bookplate of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Brooke (1830-1908) of Armitage Bridge House, near Huddersfield.…

Correspondence to and from Tankerville, relating to the Dashwood Affair. The correspondents are Lords Cartaret and Tankerville, William Pitt and Lord Clarendon. Clarendon had held the office of Postmaster General between 1763-1765 and was returned to office in 1786 following Tankerville’s dismissal.…

126 letters of the artist, engraver and poet David Jones to his friend Valerie Wynne-Williams (née Price). When they first met in 1958 Jones was in his early sixties and Price nearly forty years his junior.…

The importance of the document in terms of understanding Swindon’s development as a town through the ages cannot be understated. Nowadays, the town is closely associated with the Great Western Railway, which certainly put the town on the map. However, prior to Brunel & Co.…

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.…

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.

This diary chiefly covers the years 1940-1942, when Ayers travelled the country with Michael Rothenstein who was then working for the Recording Britain project.…

The diary’s entries focus, almost exclusively, on the activities of Maldon corps and predominantly on the number of people ‘saved’ in each meeting. Despite its limited content and the dearth of information about its author, this diary is a significant accession.…

This volume came to light during research for the Rosslyn exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland in 2002.…

In addition to being leading figures in the Midland Industrial Enlightenment the inventor and manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) and the entrepreneur printer and typographer John Baskerville (1707–75) were personal friends. A mark of their mutual esteem is the magnificent copy of Baskerville’s celebrated 1763 Cambridge Bible.

Mark Dorrington, Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections writes: The University of Nottingham is extremely grateful to the Friends of the National Libraries for supporting the purchase of this typescript of ‘Dregs’.

The curious nature of the manuscript itself may well have accounted for the price - it is a miscellany of personal thoughts and reflections on national events, human nature or the weather, but frequently relating to the textile industry in which the compiler, John Brearley of Wakefield, was engaged as a cloth ‘frizzer’.…

Emily A. Atkinson sat in a lecture hall 131 years ago assiduously taking notes on mental and moral philosophy. She was one of the first cohort of students to pass through Royal Holloway College, founded three years before, in 1886, for the education of women.…

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

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.…

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 Chemist…

The splendid rent roll listed the rents received from properties in and around Hackness for the years 1622 to 1639 and was very clearly an escape from the archive of the Derwent family of Hackness.…

Qâdi Zâda Al-Rûmî (1364–1436) was a Turkish astronomer who worked at the observatory in Samarkand, under the direction of Ulugh Beg (d. 1449). He made an important contribution to the flowering of Arabic science in Timurid Iran as one of the authors of a new star catalogue (the Zīj-i Sulṭānī) and a textbook on arithmetic.…

Eton has acquired this archive, which had been on loan to the library for the past ten years. It consists of autograph scores of 55 major orchestral and chamber works by Arnold, including two symphonies and 13 concertos.…

Thomas Plume's Library is an extraordinary survival. In 1704 Dr Thomas Plume (1630-1704), Archdeacon of Rochester, bequeathed his collection of c.…

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.…

Caroline Alice Lejeune (1897-1973) is an important figure in the history of film criticism, and in the history of women of renown from Manchester.…

The collection forms part of our extensive holdings of family and estate papers relating to the historic East Riding of Yorkshire, and provides an unusually complete picture of a family in the 19th century as well as property records dating from the 15th century onwards.…

A set of volumes relating to the Dispatch Department that operated out of Peter Scott & Co. Ltd. Wilton Path factory, their main factory, was at Buccleuch Street, Hawick. They will improve understanding of the work of a major hosiery and knitwear company that operated from Hawick 1878-2016.…

Steer-Webster, Royal Engineers, was the Deputy Director of Experimental Engineering. This department was tasked with devising a means to land troops and supplies on the Normandy beaches less well defended than those with harbours.…

These letters are more interesting than they might appear at first glance, being written in a period when Edward Thomas’s income, from what he termed ‘hack writing’ was going down - in fact by about one third in a couple years.…

This small rectangular cutting of 12 lines of Anglo-Caroline minuscule allows the museums service for the first time to display an example of the work of the St Albans scriptorium in the hand of one its own monks, demonstrating the style and skill of the Scriptorium team and providing a link to the works of the other acknowledged masters of the Abb…

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).…