The Thomas Hardy Cataloguing Project is Underway!

Hello, I’m Ruth and I began working as the Thomas Hardy Project Archivist in mid-March. I have moved down to Dorset from West Yorkshire, where I was working at Special Collections and Galleries in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. Over the next sixteen months I will be creating a detailed catalogue of the Hardy archive to make it easier to access.

For the last two months I have been checking and listing items in almost 150 boxes and folders of Hardy and Hardy-related material. Most of the collection is owned by Dorset Museum and is held on deposit at Dorset History Centre, with other items owned, donated or deposited with the History Centre itself. The collection is hugely important and very diverse. It illuminates the life, works and legacies of Hardy, and helps us to understand more about his family too.

Opening boxes for the first time in an archive is always exciting! Even with a list in front of you, you might not know exactly what the items are, how they will look, or what they will tell you. Over the last few months I have had more than a few ‘oh wow!’ moments, when I have opened a box and audibly gasped.

Hardy’s notebooks are a good example of this. They can help us to understand what Hardy was researching and can also tell us more about how he worked. The notebooks contain excerpts from varied sources, from literary criticism to the Dorset County Chronicle. Sometimes these are handwritten, and sometimes pasted in. Some include journal entries.

Hardy’s correspondence is also fascinating. There are letters in the archive from well-known writers and poets including Robert Louis Stevenson, William Morris, and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as a considerable number from J.M. Barrie. These letters help us to build up a picture of Hardy’s social and professional networks, as well reminding us of individuals who were culturally important in their day but are lesser-known now. Some of these letters are available online as part of Hardy’s Correspondents, an excellent collaboration between the University of Exeter and Dorset Museum.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be working on this project and will let you know more about the collection as it progresses.

Funding for this project has been generously provided by the Dorset Archives Trust, The National Archives,  The Valentine Trust, The Cooper-Dean Charitable Foundation, and The National Trust, together with a large number of public donations.

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