This February we’d like to think beyond the exclusivity of romantic love and open our hearts to all the affection and emotion which can be conveyed by a handwritten letter. Until the mid-twentieth century letters were the primary means of contact for people living more than a few miles apart and the pleasure of receiving a letter or note was often enormous – indeed the wish to correspond… Read more Posts from the Past
With Valentine’s Day fast approaching we wanted to look at declarations of love in our collections, in particular love letters and poems. There are some lovely pieces celebrating love, and the angst that goes along with it! — Firstly, from the Dorset County Museum King Collection archive is this very fragile 19th century example of… Read more Poems for Your Love
“…the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind…” – Sylvia Townsend Warner Although not born in Dorset, the author and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner, fell in love with the county when she visited Chaldon Herring and the surrounding area in the 1920s. A prolific writer of short stories she contributed to the New… Read more Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) & Valentine Ackland (1906-1969)
Thanks to the generosity of donors including the V&A purchase fund and the Friends of the National Libraries , DHC was fortunate enough to acquire a substantial new collection of material created by or relating to Dorset’s literary titan Thomas Hardy. We thought that it would be good to share a little more information about the purchase and to explain a little more about why… Read more Thomas Hardy – exploring a new collection (part 1)
Making New Year’s resolutions is a tradition that reportedly goes back around 4,000 years to the time of the ancient Babylonians. Despite humans practicing making resolutions for millennia we seem to be quick to abandon them! This is the month that New Year’s resolutions most commonly fail, with 80% of resolutions being cast aside in February. So we’re diving… Read more How’s that new year’s resolution going?
Public enquiries often draw our attention to collections we haven’t focused on before. Last year, we received a request to copy a selection of letters to the Blandford Overseers of the Poor, asking for parish relief. This is a fascinating record of those in a difficult position in the past, which we’ll take a closer… Read more Poor relief and charity
In the Dorset History Centre Frampton of Moreton collection there is an 1854 letter from Henry Frampton seeking advice on how to deal with a local farm labourer, John House, who had been charged with vagrancy. To understand the context of the letter we need first to back-track to find out who John House was.… Read more The ‘removal’ of John House from Affpuddle
Due to the changing world in 2020, Dorset History Centre took the decision to increase the volume and frequency of our blog content so as our readers have something interesting to read on a regular basis. We currently produce two blogs a week, on a variety of content highlighting the work we are still doing,… Read more Dorset History Centre Needs You!
At DHC our trained volunteers are usually collecting oral history interviews and we are usually working with several community projects which are planning a project or recording. However, with the advent of Covid these activities ceased. We have followed advice from the Oral History Society and The British Library and have thrown the efforts of remote volunteers into transcription and analysis. The volunteers have done… Read more To Record or Not to Record…
The sewing structure of a book is mostly invisible and, unlike a decorative cover or marble endpaper, is rarely noticed or admired. However, it is the keystone upon which the rest of the binding is made. Choose an inappropriate style, materials or tension and the lifespan of the book will be greatly shortened. This blog… Read more The techniques that bind us!
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