Previous posts on this blog have described the different collecting practices around the world, distinguishing in particular between countries where a single institution takes the main initiative (such as Namibia and Uruguay) and countries characterised by multiple collecting institutions (such as Brazil and Greece).
This post reviews collecting practices in the British Isles, where the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts (www.locationregister.com) records holdings of literary papers, remarkably, in more than 500 institutions.
The four national libraries – the British Library and the National Libraries of Ireland, Scotland and Wales – collect the papers of pre-eminent and representative authors of the four nationalities. The three additional copyright deposit libraries of Great Britain – the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and (for remote historical reasons) Trinity College Dublin – make up the first seven literary collecting repositories of any such review.
Other university libraries and archives then make a significant addition to this list, with the largest literary collections being in the Universities of Leeds, Manchester, Reading, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and major holdings also in the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Durham, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Galway, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, plus the Borthwick Institute (York), Queen’s University of Belfast, Senate House Library (University of London), University College Dublin and University College London. The combined institutions of The Keep in Brighton and Hull History Centre also include major university literary collections,
To these must be added the college libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, with the libraries of King’s College Cambridge and Trinity College Cambridge in particular holding two of the most extensive literary collections in England. Pembroke College Cambridge has a remarkable collection of papers not only of its alumnus Ted Hughes, but also of his Irish friends Seamus Heaney and John Montague, while the papers of Douglas Adams (including manuscripts of ‘The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’) are in St John’s College Cambridge; Somerville College Oxford has an important Vera Brittain collection; and the Max Beerbohm collection in Merton College Oxford includes Max’s top hat with a poem written inside.
Museums play a smaller literary role in the British Isles than in some countries, but mention should be made of the collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum, especially its Theatre & Performance Department, as well as the Fitzwilliam Museum (Hardy’s manuscript of ‘Jude the obscure’), Fermanagh County Museum, Keswick Museum and Art Gallery (housing some manuscripts of Hugh Walpole), the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre and the Manx Museum (manuscripts of Hall Caine).
Literary papers amongst collections which are not themselves primarily literary produce some of the most unexpected entries in the Location Register, for institutions including the National Archives, the House of Lords Record Office, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Imperial War Museum (papers of Isaac Rosenberg), the National Army Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Churchill College Cambridge, Glasgow Women’s Library, The Women’s Library and the British Library of Political and Economic Science.
Local libraries and record offices also have interesting collections of literary authors and these include London Archives (holding the Bogle L’Ouverture Archive), Liverpool Record Office (archive of Nicholas Monsarrat), Gloucestershire Archives (papers of the Dymock Poets), Nottinghamshire Archives, Bath Record Office, Bridlington Library (manuscripts of Winifred Holtby), Street Public Library, Salisbury Public Library (manuscripts of John Creasey), and Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre (archive of Jeremy Sandford).
Some universities also collect by locality, notably Exeter (papers of Charles Causley and Daphne du Maurier), Nottingham (D. H. Lawrence), Swansea (Dylan Thomas), Aberdeen (Edith Anne Robertson), Dundee (Mary Brooksbank) and Cambridge University Library (the ‘Cambridge School’ of poets).
Of archival collections personally donated by the author, among the most outstanding are the Alan Bennett archive at the Bodleian Library, the Seamus Heaney collection in the National Library of Ireland and the Samuel Beckett and Peter Robinson collections in the University of Reading.
There are a number of fascinating special repositories, including the BBC Written Archives Centre, Seven Stories the Centre for Children’s Books (papers of Enid Blyton and Ursula Moray Williams) and the Dean Heritage Centre (papers of Dennis Potter). Other such centres include Surrey History Centre (papers of R. C. Sherriff) and Dorset History Centre, which holds the principal archive of Thomas Hardy, as well as a fine collection of papers of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland.
A British peculiarity is the literary collecting by libraries of private schools (strangely known as “public schools”). Papers of, or collected by, former pupils feature at the King’s School Canterbury (housing other manuscripts of Hugh Walpole), Harrow School, and the two Cheltenham Colleges, while Eton College Library has developed one of the largest collections of literary archives in the country, including papers of non-Etonians (manuscripts of Susan Hill).
The geographical span of the collections runs from Jersey Archive (papers of Gerald Durrell) to Orkney Library and Archives (a George Mackay Brown collection) and Shetland Archives (a Peter A, Jamieson collection), or from the University of Galway (papers of John McGahern and Thomas Kilroy) to Tasglann Nan Eilean Siar in Stornoway (papers of James Shaw Grant) to the University of Kent at Canterbury (manuscripts of F. C. Burnand).
Papers of the best-known modern poets are widely distributed. The poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum saw Peter Redgrove as the greatest poet of the later twentieth century. Redgrove’s papers are in the University of Sheffield, while Hobsbaum’s are in the University of Glasgow. Other candidates might be Tony Harrison (Leeds), Elaine Feinstein or Elizabeth Jennings (John Rylands University Library of Manchester), Dannie Abse or Gwyneth Lewis (National Library of Wales), Tessa Ransford or Kathleen Jamie (National Library of Scotland), Anne Stevenson or Charles Tomlinson (Cambridge University Library), and then Philip Larkin (Hull History Centre and the Bodleian Library), Ted Hughes (the British Library) or Seamus Heaney (National Library of Ireland). For more recent poets laureate, the papers of Andrew Motion are in the British Library and those of Simon Armitage are in the University of Leeds, while the papers of the archetypal poet laureate are in the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. Some papers of Carol Ann Duffy are in the Adrian Henri Archive (University of Liverpool) and the Jackie Kay Archive (National Library of Scotland). Fine poets whose reputations perhaps exceed their readership include Geoffrey Hill (Leeds), Donald Davie (Essex) and J. H. Prynne (Cambridge University Library).
For the editors of the Location Register, this extraordinary spread and variety of locations provides a pleasing justification of the need for their work.
[This post is one of a series. For similar notes about other countries, use the Search box above to look for Austria, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Namibia, Nigeria, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Uruguay and Vietnam]
