Confessions of a Manuscripts Curator

‘Of course, my family had the lake moved round from the other side of the house.’

My hostess pushed aside a magazine to allow the butler to put down the cafetière on a side table. It was a copy of Country Life, with a picture of this very mansion on the cover. In my anxiety not to appear too eager to see her ancestor’s papers, I had made the mistake of admiring the view out of her windows. She now seemed likely to go off on a metaphorical stroll round her own grounds. ‘Well,’ I said, trying to recall her to the point, ‘the papers you sent up to the Library did turn out to include some Capability Brown drawings. Someone had written “stables” in red biro on the back of one of them.’ ‘I was going to throw them away. I’d no idea they were valuable.’ She poured the coffee. ‘So tell me, what sort of manuscripts do you have in the national collection?’ ‘Oh, everything. They cover two thousand years. From papyrus to pixel. National treasures, I suppose. The Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf, Magna Carta. We have two of those,’ I added brightly. ‘But you can’t find things like that these days, can you?’ ‘Oh, you’d be surprised at what turns up in people’s lofts.’ And, I might have added, on a Lancashire rubbish tip (Thomas Traherne’s ‘Commentaries of Heaven’), in a cupboard during a search for ping-pong balls (‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, c. 1440), or being used by a parlourmaid to light the fire (antique ballads in the mid-seventeenth century ‘Percy Folio’). But lofts would do well enough. I recollected crunching glass underfoot in the darkness when retrieving the papers of a colonial governor from a house in Sussex. Then there was the archive of a Georgian Lord Chancellor that had come out of an attic in the West Country, a fortnight before the roof finally let in the rain. It was not only birds, mice or insects that had worked on those papers. A child of the family, while collecting stamps, had carefully torn off the corners of most of the Victorian envelopes without, unfortunately, first removing the letters inside. The result was epistolary doilies. Some lofts though are well appointed. A modern one in the Midlands has been converted into an exemplary archive room. Everything is labelled, even the box marked ‘wasps’ nest’. What, however, I suspect the lady with the mobile lake was really asking – something I was frequently asked and, indeed, often asked myself – was a rather different question. What should be preserved for the nation? It was a question which was relatively easy to answer when Sir Robert Cotton, amongst others, first proposed to Elizabeth I that she set up a national library and, on her refusal, established his own manuscript library as a substitute. What he wanted to assemble were the title deeds of the kingdom and its constitution, particularly those documents chronicling the rise and privileges of Parliament. He was so successful that Charles I had the Cotton Library locked up. Posthumous victory, however, went to Cotton. From the eighteenth century onwards, his collection has formed one of the treasures of the national library. Since his time, though, the answer has varied. Biblical and classical scholars have always valued early texts. When in 1731 Dr Bentley ran out of the Royal Library in his nightshirt, having forgotten to put the overnight damper on the fire, it was the four volumes of Codex Alexandrinus, one of the earliest texts of the Bible in Greek, that he carried to safety from the enveloping flames. To many people, however, manuscripts overwhelmingly conjure up a vision of illuminated manuscripts. These have been a staple of the national collection ever since Edward IV was forced into exile with his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and grew envious of the contents of his library. On his restoration he ordered volumes by the shelf-load from Flanders for his own court. Today, the collection at the British Library is effectively the national gallery of medieval art. For their curator, it is not just a case of financing the transfer of those illuminated manuscripts still in private hands into the public domain. Given the willingness of past owners to vandalize these books for their art – John Ruskin famously admitted to his diary ‘Cut up Missal in evening – hard work’ – it is often a question of reassembling them, or as much of them as has survived. Thus, in 2004 it proved possible to reunite with its parent manuscript the last errant leaf of the Sforza Hours, painted for the Dowager Duchess of Milan in the 1490s. This portrayed a man and woman on horseback, their horses almost certainly modelled on the famous but never completed equestrian statue of the first Sforza Duke by Leonardo da Vinci. Literary manuscripts began to be collected in the eighteenth century – though in the case of Shakespeare, none of whose handwriting was known to survive, with the exception of a few signatures, all different, they had to be manufactured first by the enterprising hand of W. H. Ireland. In the 1790s, Ireland revealed to an astonished world examples of Shakespeare’s correspondence and even a hitherto unknown play, Vortigern, before the final exposure of his forgeries. At the same time, personal and political archives came into their own. In 1787, Sir John Fenn began to publish the Paston letters, a fifteenth-century archive rich in some of the earliest private correspondence to survive in this country, including the first English valentines. Many of these letters entered the national collection in the nineteenth century as did the papers of the first Duke of Newcastle, Prime Minister to two Hanoverian kings. These contain George III’s manuscript insertion in his first speech to Parliament ‘I glory in the name of Britain’, famously misreported in the press as ‘I glory in the name of Briton’, thus underlining the importance of seeing the original. As country houses all over Britain gave up their treasures, such archives revealed the political machinations of the mighty. However, the very best could also conjure up the past, and all its curious sights and smells, with startling immediacy. The Papers of the Spencer family not only show Lord Sunderland complaining that he cannot find any bricklayers to work at Althorp because they are all in London rebuilding the city after the Great Fire, but also Charles II’s spaniel-keeper lamenting that his pension has been reduced at the Glorious Revolution. Then there is the urgent petition from the inhabitants of Acton and Ealing to Queen Anne, pleading that the body of a local arsonist, hung in chains near the highway, be taken down as, with the onset of spring, the stench is becoming unendurable. Some manuscripts are still presented to the nation or sold at a very favourable price by owners eager to enrich the country’s heritage. Such generosity is a delight, as are some of the papers and artefacts they preserve, whether Jane Austen’s writing-desk or the 1925 school report of a famous author – ‘Violin: Lack of bow has spoilt his chances’ – showing how impressive the aspirations of a country secondary school might be in the early twentieth century. Most manuscripts, however, have to be striven for, either in the auction room or out in the country. The curator must have an appetite for the work and a catholic taste. One of my proudest trophies was the Punch table. This is inscribed with the initials of Thackeray and many other famous contributors to the magazine, all of whom had dined at it. If not the most unusual manuscript ever acquired by the Library, it must certainly be the largest. A curator also requires considerable powers of endurance. If having unwisely remarked on the autograph note by an eminent bibliophile in the lavatory of a noble house in the Midlands that he has repaired the cistern, the seeker after manuscripts must be prepared to acquiesce if his hostess then insists on photographing him enthroned thereon, holding the superseded ballcock in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Events can sometimes take an even more unexpected turn. While examining the manuscripts at Holkham, a nineteenth-century predecessor managed to embrace a thorough-going study of his fellow house guest, the notorious Lady Ellenborough. His diary entry for the encounter ends with the words, ‘Gracious God! Was there ever such fortune!’ There was a time when it would have been thought beyond the pale to collect the papers of the living. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, almost the only manuscript of someone still alive at the time it was presented to the national collection, excluding a composition by Mozart written when he was in London in 1765 aged 9, was Field Marshal Haig’s famous Order of the Day for 11 April 1918: ‘With our backs to the wall . . . each one of us must fight on to the end.’ This was already a public document and scarcely life-enhancing. Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the mania for collecting autographs, the national collection was seen as a pantheon or Valhalla for the nation’s heroes and heroines. In consequence, it contains some notable farewells: Nelson’s last letter to Lady Hamilton, ‘I hope to God that I shall live to finish my letter after the Battle’; Gordon’s final message from Khartoum, ‘I have done my best for the honour of my country. Good bye’; and Scott’s poignant valediction, ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ Death was a prerequisite. Indeed, some manuscripts are quite literally relics, whether the jewel-encrusted cover of a Carolingian Gospels containing the bones of saints or the early twentieth-century binding made for T. J. Wise, the book collector and forger, as a shrine for Shelley’s ashes. Since the 1960s, however, the world has been turned upside down. Souls have been bared, as well as much else, and the lace curtains torn aside. Little is now considered private, and the public feel they have the right to know almost everything. It cannot be an accident that this has coincided with a period when the competition to collect contemporary manuscripts has become intense. The rise of myriad new repositories has only fuelled the demand. The papers of living authors are at a premium and their international appeal has meant they are particularly at risk of leaving the country. Any curator worth his salt now has to approach famous politicians and writers while they are still in their prime. That delicacy of feeling which can lead to delay may be deadly. Whereas in the past a little discreet coffin-chasing was considered just about acceptable, now all sense of decency must be cast to the winds. What is needed is the forthright approach. This was brought home to me with brutal clarity when I was being shown the archive of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century inventors. Most of his scientific notes were missing. All that was left was a terse letter from the Director of a rival museum. ‘Many congratulations on your ninetieth birthday, and can we have your papers?’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © C. J. Wright 2009