48 grants for 2022.
This 'little book' written by Charlotte when she was 13, was thought to be the last of the little books still in private hands. In 2021 FNL donated 7 little books from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library to the joint ownership of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the British Library and the Brotherton Library (University of Leeds).…
Celine Luppo McDaid, Hyde Director and Curator, writes: We are most grateful to FNL for the grant that enabled us to acquire The Convict’s Address. The pamphlet is well known amongst Johnsonians, and has great relevance beyond, in terms of questions of social histor
A collection of Kent charters 1264-1654 collected by Thomas Godfrey-Faussett, auditor to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury from 1866, who must have purchased them at one of the sales of Dering family muniments.…
Richard Ford (1796-1858) was an English writer, collector and amateur artist. In 1830 he visited Spain and over the next three years in the country he made over 500 drawings.…
Born in London, Pugin was one of the most significant architects, designers and theorists in the history of British design and architecture. His ideas underpinned the 19th-century Gothic Revival and paved the way for the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe and America.…
This volume provides a fascinating insight into domestic and material culture in the 18th century with reference to payments for linen and furniture alongside the purchase of crops and other good such as coal, straw, and apples.…
Sir Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, GCB, PRS was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences. He accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage of discovery around the world, he also visited Newfoundland, Iceland, and Holland.…
Draft manuscript of the memoirs of Caroline Herschel. Caroline, and her brother William (1738-1822), who discovered the planet Uranus, were leading astronomers of the 18th and early 19th century, and Caroline was the first woman to be paid as a professional astronomer in the United Kingdom.…
A rare autograph letter from the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel to his son Isambard who was then studying at the University of Oxford. It was written soon after the launch of the SS Great Eastern steamship.…
Medieval deeds provide an important insight into property ownership and transactions and also document people who may have owned adjoining property or acted as witnesses to a transaction. As such, they are invaluable resources for local and family historians from a time when few other written records survive to shed light on local residents.
Diaries can be some of the most powerful documents that we hold, providing a fascinating insight into the inner lives of people in the past. The diary of Francis Fearon is no exception.…
The collection provides an important insight into the establishment and operation of the Baybridge Canal Company from its inception in 1825; accounts from that year record expenses incurred in preparing the Baybridge Navigation Act and producing handbills and advertisements inviting tenders for digging the canal and building locks.…
A collection of documents and ephemera relating to the residence at Kelmscott Manor of Jane Morris (1839 – 1914) and her daughter May Morris (1862 – 1938), and the Manor’s subsequent transition of ownership to Oxford University.
The majority of these documents relate to the rental, sale and development of land in the tenantry laines of Brighton. The tenantry laines were fields surrounding the town which were sold off piecemeal to developers during the early 19th century: the layout of the strips within those fields determines the contemporary street pattern of this area o…
Dickson, Archer & Thorp were important Northumberland solicitors. The practice was established in 1817 and continued until 2005. At this point there existed an unbroken series of business records and clients’ papers dating back to the date of establishment and including records of the predecessor practices, making the collection a unique resource.…
Anna Manthorpe, Archivist, writes: When this journal came up at auction, we soon realised that it was part of a gap between 1861-1905 in a series of similar volumes from Uckfield Police Station (SPS/18). We were very pleased that a grant from the Friends of the National Libraries allowed us to purchase it.
An illustrated manuscript on large paper, reproducing the text and woodcuts of the second Latin xylographic edition of the 'Speculum humanae salvationis', executed by Jacques Fucien Lesclabart, one of the most famous French calligraphers of the eighteenth century.
The manuscript was once owned by Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), one of the founders of the Early Music movement, and as part of his collection of books and instruments has been available to scholars for over a century. The manuscript was initially sold to a foreign buyer at Sotheby’s in September 2021 and shortly thereafter the Culture Minister pla…
Sir John Champneys was Lord Mayor of London in 1534. He began the building of Hall Place in 1538, at the same time he secured a 100 year lease of the Manor of Bexley from Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Shortly before the primate had exchanged it with Henry VIII for various other properties in Kent.…
The map fills in an important gap in the history of the title of the property providing evidence that Robert Offley left the farm in trust for the benefit of the Chaplain and Curate of Oakwood Chapel in Wootton, Surrey, with the map having been commissioned by the curate of Oakwood Chapel at the time, John Hallam.…
This lot comprised nine deeds only one of which was relevant to West Sussex, the other eight were donated to seven other archive services around the country. FNL is happy to respond to applications for grants which employ this sort of collaborative approach.
David Lloyd George is one of Wales’ greatest politicians. He narrowly won the Caernarvon Boroughs by-election in 1890 and held the seat, although sometimes narrowly, until his death in 1945. In 1908 when he was appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer.…
Jonathan Ridsdale, Acquisitions Librarian, writes: This large folio contains 40 heliogravures, including 10 enhanced with watercolour, and 20 pages of specific information on the building projects; it is copy number six of only 110 produced.
A collection of 535 documents, which provides a fine case study in the accumulation of a close-knit family’s estate in and around Macclesfield, and their various exchanges of property, given added value by the significant roles which members of that family played in the public and commercial life of the town.…
Peepal Tree Press is an independent company based in Leeds and is the world’s leading publisher of Caribbean and Black British writing. Since its foundation in 1985, Peepal Tree has published well over 300 titles.…
Sam Johnston, Service Manager for Archives and Records writes: In June 2022 Dorset History Centre (DHC) was able to acquire the original architectural designs and drawings for Athelhampton or
The Church of Scotland Minister, Robert Blair (1699-1746) is an unusual figure in Scottish literature as he had a prominent reputation which rested on limited publications and virtually no original manuscripts. This volume represents the single biggest collection of Blair’s poetry and religious writings found to date, all of which are unpublished.
The book bears an inscription from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Claire Clairmont. This two-volume edition is one of only ten surviving books with Shelley's presentation inscriptions, and is the second Shelley-inscribed book to join the collection of the Keats-Shelley House.
Proctors’ account book for St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Newbury, Berkshire, 1624-1697, together with three deeds for properties in Northbrook Street, Newbury, 1689, 1733 and 1796.…
The records of York Street Chapel and the Robert Browning Settlement, a religious and later charitable institution that was based in Walworth, South London for nearly 200 years. The chapel, founded in 1790, was home as a congregational church to many including, famously, the poet Robert Browning and his family.…
Edward Thomas was a literary critic, writer and, ultimately, poet who was killed in the First World War at the beginning, literally, of the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April, 1917.…
Liam Sims, Rare Books Specialist, writes: Daniel Waterland was the most influential early 18th-century teacher of divinity in the University of Cambridge and the most significant defender of the doctrine of the Trinity, masterminding attacks on Clarke and later Sir Isaac Newton.
The scrapbook titled 'Collections of Sussex' contains 343 prints (five of which are coloured), 21 sketches (including two watercolours), and 28 maps and plans. These cover the whole of Sussex. It is a useful summary of images of local views in the days before photography.…
Pusey House Library and Archive is an independent institution founded in 1884 to keep alive the theological legacy of the Anglo-Catholic figurehead Dr Edward Bouverie-Pusey (1800-1882). These six letters – not are they fairly lengthy, and they demonstrate Pusey’s thoughts on a range of moral and economic matters.
A manuscript survey by G(eorge)? Ingham of the Dorset held Estates of Henry Lord Arundell, 8th Baron Arundell of Wardour. Although a Wiltshire-based family, the Lords Arundell owned substantial lands in the adjacent county of Dorset.…
These rolls are presumed to be personal copies of Edward Russell (1653-1727). They are formal documents, written with iron gall ink in a court hand onto parchment membranes. Each roll consists of many membranes that are sewn together.
The China Magazine was a short-lived periodical produced by and for the British ex-pat community in Hong Kong between 1868 and 1870. It is probably the first publication of any kind in the Far East to incorporate pasted-in original photographs.…
With over 1,000 items, the archive includes letters, notebooks, family papers and artworks relating to geologist and theologian William Buckland.…
Smillie Archive, comprising the personal papers of Robert Ramsay ‘Bob’ Smillie (1917-1937), the labour activist and anti-fascist volunteer, together with papers of his father, Alexander Frame Smillie (1896-1984), and grandfather, Robert Smillie (1857-1940).
A group of watercolours from the collection of the English botanist, William Curtis (1746-1799). Thirteen were bought with a full grant from FNL, 13 having previously been bought at the Catherine Southon Auctioneers’ auction.…
Rudyard Kipling and his family made several visits to South Africa between 1898 and 1908 for winter holidays and, whilst there, he was introduced to Edmund Garrett. It is likely that shared opinions and inquisitive minds brought Kipling and Garrett together.…
The Hours of Louis Quarré is a lavishly illustrated manuscript, probably created in Ghent towards the end of the 15th century. By the time the manuscript was acquired by Francis Douce in 1832 (and bequeathed to the Bodleian by him in 1834), several of its full-page miniatures had been removed.…
Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' or 'Issledovaniia o prirode i prichinakh bogatstva narodov s primechaniiami Bentama, Blanki, Bukhanana, Garn'e, Mak-Kulokha, Mal-tusa, Millia, Rikardo, Seia, Sismondi I Tirgu'.…
As the catalogue puts it, the exhibition featured ‘500 Oil Sketches of India and the Archipelago, painted on the spot by Marianne North’. The sense that these pictures were painted ‘on the spot’, their freshness and immediacy, was seen as their greatest strength.…
Dr Hugh Maguire, Director, The Dr Williams’s Trust, writes: These three folio volumes form a welcome addition to the library collections, complementing as they do the existing holdings and the Trust’s aspirations for the future growth and refinement of its richly diverse collections. The purchase was suppor
Two items relating to ‘In Parenthesis’, the war poem written by artist, engraver and poet David Jones (1895-1974), namely a proof copy of the completed work and a draft radio script. ‘In Parenthesis’ was an immediate success and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1938.…
The most complete of its kind, this survey depicts the tracks of HMS Investigator, under the command of Robert McClure, between 1850 and 1851 during its search for John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic.…
