Information about major new manuscript and archive acquisitions. Recent acquisitions include the John Berger, Graham Swift, Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter archives, and the Dering Roll.
The Guilford Papers: the Archive of Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford
In 2006 the correspondence and papers amassed by Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford (1766-1827) were accepted by H. M. Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to the British Library. A full catalogue has now been completed.
Guilford was the third and youngest son of the Prime Minister, Lord North. Much of his life and career was spent out of England, in southern Europe as well as the Near and Middle East, but his most enduring interest was in Greek history and culture. Having been received into the Greek Orthodox church on Corfu, he played a key role in founding the Ionian University, which educated a generation of Greek-speaking lawyers, doctors and civil servants. At its inauguration in 1824, he became its first chancellor and remained its generous patron until his death. He also amassed a notable collection of Greek and Italian books and manuscripts. After his death this was broken up, but a substantial part, both printed and manuscript, was afterwards acquired by the British Library and has been the focus of an earlier successful project.
While some his own countrymen tended to view Guilford as an eccentric who had abandoned the norms of his patrician class to adopt foreign ways, the records of his career, now they are fully catalogued, reveal the full extent of his European commitment and networks. By far the largest sequence of papers is that relating to Corfu and the Ionian Academy. These contain many hundreds of letters from European scholars and professionals with a common interest in Greek culture and education. They wrote to Guilford with specialist advice on the subjects to be taught at the Academy, or simply to express admiration and support for his enterprise: a broad spectrum of professionals active in the 1810s and 1820s, including chemists, naturalists and geologists, clergy, doctors, lawyers, teachers and librarians, historians and archaeologists, architects and painters.
The archive will also benefit anyone with an interest in this period of Greek history. The correspondence includes letters commenting on the progress of the War of Independence from activists and statesmen such as Ioannis Kapodistrias, Alexandros Mavrokordatos and Spyridon Trikoupis. The last, a friend of Lord Byron, refers to his death and funeral in 1824. There are also letters from private individuals directly affected by the war.
This cataloguing project has been made possible with the aid of generous grants from the J. F. Coustopolis and the Hellenic Foundations.
John Berger archive
The eminent writer, critic, and thinker John Berger has announced the donation of his archive to the British Library.
The archive includes drafts of some of Berger’s most famous works – including the 1972 Booker Prize winning novel G, the Into their Labours trilogy, and the recent Booker-nominated novel From A to X – as well as scripts, correspondence, and articles.
Graham Swift archive
The British Library has acquired 75 files boxes comprising the complete extant archive of acclaimed novelist Graham Swift. The collection contains manuscripts, notes, revisions and proofs relating to all eight of his novels – including Waterland and the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders – his short story collection Learning to Swim and his recently published non-fiction collection Making an Elephant.
In addition to the literary drafts (which date back to essays written by Swift as an under-graduate, and even a school-boy), the archive includes professional correspondence with friends and colleagues including Andrew Motion, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Michael Ondaatje, Ted Hughes and Caryl Phillips. The Hughes letters include tips for fishing the River Torridge in Devon, together with Hughes’s handwritten sketches marking ‘fish traps’ along the river, and complement the fishing diaries in the recently acquired Ted Hughes archive (see below). Among the more unusual items in the archive is a tape recording of the answer phone messages he received on the night he won the Booker Prize, including messages from fellow authors congratulating him on his win.
The archive has been purchased for £110,000, with £10,000 of the cost of the acquisition generously funded by the Friends of the British Library. The cost includes funding to fully conserve and catalogue the collection, which is expected to be available to researchers by early 2010.
Ted Hughes Archive
The British Library has acquired a previously unknown archive of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. It comprises over 200 files and boxes and manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries and ephemera and offers an invaluable resource for researchers in all areas of Hughes's prolific and wide-ranging career.
At the heart of the archive are the manuscripts relating to Birthday Letters, Hughes's collection of poems charting and exploring his relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Birthday Letters was published in 1998 and attracted widespread critical acclaim, as well as achieving phenomenal sales. There are also poetical drafts, both published and unpublished, of material relating to volumes such as Capriccio, Remains of Elmet and Crow, which span the length of Hughes's career. Other highlights include Hughes's personal diaries, recording daily events, accounts of dreams and reflections on his family and his past, alongside fragments of poems and writings on historical and literary figures. There is also an extensive correspondence with leading literary figures, including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Kathleen Raine, Thom Gunn and Tom Paulin.
The entire archive has been purchased for the nation for £500,000 with the contribution of a grant of £200,000 from the Shaw Trust and generous contributions from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Friends of the British Library.
The archive is to be catalogued and is expected to be made fully available by the end of 2009. A notebook containing early autograph drafts of Birthday Letters, revealing that Hughes had originally planned for the volume to be entitled ‘The Sorrows of the Deer', is on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library.
Further details can be found in our press release
The Dering Roll
The British Library has secured ownership of the Dering Roll, the oldest-surviving English roll of arms. Dating from the late-13th century, the Dering Roll provides a vital record for the study of knighthood in medieval England. Painted on a green background, it contains 324 coats of arms, representing one quarter of the entire English baronage during the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307).
The Roll was made in South-East England, and is the work of a specialist herald. It gives special emphasis to knights from the counties of Kent and Sussex, and includes the arms of several sheriffs of Kent and four constables of Dover Castle. The Dering Roll was most likely commissioned by Stephen of Penchester, Constable of Dover Castle from 1268 to 1299, whose own arms are displayed in a prominent position on the roll.
This document is named after an early owner, Sir Edward Dering (d. 1644), who served as lieutenant of Dover Castle. The sixty-first shield on this roll originally bore the arms of a certain Nicholas de Crioll, but Dering had this erased, inserting his own arms bearing the name of a fictional ancestor, Richard fitz Dering.
The Dering Roll was sold at Sotheby's in December 2007, but was subsequently made the subject of an export bar. It has now been purchased for the nation for £194,000, with the generous support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, the Friends of the British Library, and numerous individual benefactors.
At the same auction the British Library purchased Cooke's Ordinary, the earliest ordinary of arms from medieval Europe. On its reverse is painted the Balliol Roll, the oldest roll of arms for Scotland.
The Dering Roll and the Balliol Roll will be on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library from 1st September 2008.
The Harold Pinter Archive
The archive of Britain's leading playwright and writer, the 2005 Literature Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, has been acquired by the British Library. It comprises over 150 boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, programmes, and emails offers an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars of Pinter's work for stage, cinema, and poetry.here
Harold Pinter’s notes and drafts for his work for the theatre, cinema, and poetry have been on loan to the British Library since 1993. This original deposit has now been secured in perpetuity for the Library’s collections, and has been updated to reflect Pinter’s recent output, including drafts for the screenplay ‘Sleuth’ (dir. Kenneth Brannagh, 2007). The Library has also acquired a collection of 12,000 letters and emails, including correspondence with Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Joseph Losey, Arthur Miller and John Osborne. Together with material relating to the award of the Nobel Prize, cuttings books, and a significant collection of production photographs from around the world, these papers amount to one of the most significant post-War literary archives of one of the greatest Anglophone playwrights of the 20th century.
The entire archive has been purchased for the nation for £1.1million with the aid of a grant of £216,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and generous grants from Dr Alice Griffin, American Trust for the British Library, Michael Marks Charitable Trust, other private trusts and donors - in addition to British Library funds.
Read the Harold Pinter Archive Blog.
