Contents
The 'album' contains letters from some people of local significance, like Thomas Bewick, Richard Grainger, George Stephenson, George Otto Trevelyan, and Robert Spence Watson.
| Other letters are written by such household names as A.E. Houseman, Horatio Nelson, William Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, Thomas Carlyle, |  |
The letters are diverse: there is a request for an address to facilitate the delivery of a bear skin from David Walton (1859); an account of the pranks of the 'Borrowdale Bogle' from J. Arkle (1856); the refusal to grant Madame de Bury's request that an officer in the Indian Army be promoted by Richard Airey (1860); a description of his house in China by James Bruce Elgin (1860); and a discussion of French politics and her newly-married life in the country by Frances (i.e. Fanny) Burney (1792).
The earliest item in the collection is a printed requisition notice for money to pay for the victualling of the fleet, dated 6th June 1668 and signed “Albermarle” (i.e. George Monk, 1st Duke of Albermarle). For the most part, the various documents date from the Nineteenth Century. There is a small amount of twentieth-century material, the most recent of the documents being an acknowledgement of the receipt of two offprints which had been sent from C.H. Hunter Blair to Charles Clay in 1956.
