 Human beings need stories. I think it's Philip Pullman who said that after food and shelter, the next thing that human beings need is stories. Stories help us make sense of our lives and the world and our place in them. They shine lights, they illuminate, they make history come alive. It might be a hundred years since these things were written, but actually the kind of basics of human relationships and interconnectedness with the landscape and love and loss are things that really still resonate with people. The Hummersfield Library is packed with stories. The stories of the objects inside the library, but also the stories of how those objects actually came together in the library. It contained a treasure trove of priceless manuscripts and nobody knew what happened whether it had secretly been sold off. I was anxious that these manuscripts would just be solved, that we'd never get to see them again and that we'd never really get to know exactly what was in the collection. These gems, if they're not saved, are lost forever. The Hummersfield Library is one of the greatest collections of 19th century literary manuscripts and other writings ever put together by a private individual. It's called Hummersfield because of the house where William Law the Collector lived. William Law himself was a mill owner in Rochdale, Lancashire. He was a learned man who was actually deeply interested in the manuscripts he collected. They weren't simply financial investments. He collected from a great love of literature. In his collection he has manuscripts of Robert Burns, of Walter Scott, Jane Austen and the most extraordinary collection of manuscripts from the Bronte sisters. I think it's amazing that Law at that time was collecting these writers. It's such an interesting story, you know, a fascination that he was collecting manuscripts at such a diverse range. He wasn't going after just any old book, he wanted the best so things that were actually written in the hand of the author or that were exceptionally rare printed books. It's a bit of a story of an obsession, a sort of love affair with literature. There's kind of a magical quality about it. The materials that were contained as part of this collection are absolutely vital to British cultural heritage. They represent the development of literature and of some of the key writers that have helped to shape our cultural thoughts. Each of the items are exceptionally rare in their own right or unique because they're handwritten. To have so many linked together as part of one collection is vanishingly rare. Nobody's seen them for a hundred years. Very few scholars have managed to get in to see them and that suddenly this treasure trove of manuscripts and letters and stuff would come to light just seemed remarkable. Some of the material has not been seen for nearly a century. Some of the material was presumed lost. It was an extraordinary collection put together by people with a fantastic eye for great works and great manuscripts. It's like a fairy tale. A hidden library that somewhere no one's, you know, I think a few academics had heard about it and there'd been rumours that such a library existed. It was the sleeping beauty of a library and suddenly it's there, it's awake and it's got untold treasures in it. It was unthinkable that this would not be saved. I first saw this just in the news, in the media. I saw the announcements about the impending sale What Sotheby's were doing essentially is they were offering a private sale of a small section of the library and the rest was going to go into three auctions over 18 months. It felt like this was a hugely expensive auction coming down the line clearly full of astonishing treasures, very, very relevant to our collections and to dozens of other institutions across the UK but no obvious means that we could see to actually either keep it together in any sense or even literally keep it in the country. Initially it was excitement that this collection's come to light and then there was the shock of realising that probably the reality was this collection would be snapped up by private collectors. Quite often items such as this when they come up for sale would just go to the highest bidder and they could just be distributed all across the world. But it was evident that this was just on a scale that we would not be able to do at all by ourselves. This was all a kind of mounting pressure and as it mounted the conviction that this must be saved grew in everybody. Crucial to this journey of saving this extraordinary library was Friends of the National Library. We are a small charity which gives grants to libraries large and small. They're an independent charity but which exists to fundraise and make acquisitions on behalf of libraries across the UK that have national significance and often to play a role in actually saving items that might otherwise disappear into private hands and go overseas. And the more we learnt, the more we saw, the more we inquired, we realised this was absolute gold plated literary treasure and at risk of leaving our United Kingdom. So first stop I call the Chairman of Solopies and he says if you can raise the money we will halt the sale. So without even knowing the price I said done deal, we will save this library. Shortly afterwards the price tag was revealed to be £15 million which was by a multiple of many hundreds more than we had ever raised. So we were staggered by the amount we had to raise and we had only six months to raise it so there was never a point when the clock wasn't ticking we were always aware that that was a high achieve. We came up with a plan and that was to go and see the most generous people in Britain and my most amazing and fruitful conversation was going to have breakfast and I suddenly in the middle of breakfast said this could be the greatest literary philanthropic saving gesture and he bought the idea and he said if you raise the rest I will match it. So we knew as the clock was ticking that we had to reach £7.5 million and then we would get the other £7.5 million from Solene. The next stage we lit a fuse and we wanted to make sure that this journey by the Friends of the National Library was successful. The idea began to emerge that maybe just on this particular occasion Friends of National Libraries might have a very particular role to play to actually create the circumstances for all of us to actually join forces and work together to see if we could actually unite kind of play a sort of common chord almost to actually get everyone in unison. We set up a consortium and we said let's try and work together to make sure that this library, this collection was saved. The only way it could be done was by all the institutions involved agreeing to set aside temporarily their competitive interests in a single object and just work together for our common good. The Friends of the National Libraries have such nationwide respect as an organisation that they could, as it were, hold together the libraries working for a common good and they could also be a compelling focus for donors of various kinds. After LEMBLOVAC makes extraordinary generous offer the second most generous organisation and they were magnificent was the National Heritage Memorial Fund who came in with a stonking four million pounds. We had funding given in accordance with their means by the various libraries and literary houses involved. People just gave so generously and were really motivated by the magical story behind these collections. There was never a moment when we thought we're not going to do this because, you know, that was thinking the unthinkable. Once the money was raised the Friends of the National Libraries began the process of dividing it amongst the consortium of national libraries and literary houses. Friends of the National Library owned it for one million legal seconds before we spread it all out across the country. It was not easy because there were lots of debates, of course, to be heard about which items would end up in which collection and where and how do you maintain that blend of geography, continuity, coherence, access and so on. It's really important that these are properly looked after. They're incredibly valuable and incredibly rare so it's important that they're kept somewhere that they can be really curated and kept for future generations. I think that it's important for people to have access to that so that they can study the writers more so they can get a sense of how those writers fit into the wider cultural context and the wider history of our country. I think it's important that we're digitising the materials so they will be put up on our website. People will be able to access them not just from Scotland but all across the world. Right from the moment the material comes into the building it's going to be practically helpful for academics but at the same time it's going to be accessible for anyone that wants to view them across the world. The decision to enter into a joint ownership model with institutions spread around the country from Scotland down to Hampshire and almost everywhere else in between I think that was a very, very powerful message. Collaboration rather than competition. One of the great strengths of the collection is its roots in local writers' houses. Many of these manuscripts are actually produced in a writer's house and it's been a great joy to redistribute the material back to its origins. There is a squaring of the circle in returning Jane Austen's letters to Jane Austen's house. Charlotte Bronte's letters to Charlotte Bronte's house. Texts don't exist in isolation. They all come from a context and so often that context is place to see examples of writing by the authors who have lived and loved and moved in the places with which they're familiar is tremendously powerful. These papers have been locked away with one family for 150 years I think and I think by bringing them to the Brotherton to the Bronte Parsonage, the British Library all of those are places that any member of the public can come in and say, I would like to see them. These are magical items. They have such power to move anybody who sees them. It's just extraordinary and it's got to be one of the greatest finds in the last 100 years. When you actually have the piece of paper in the room that's when it really comes alive and that's why I think it's so important that we retain these documents. It was never easy but both for the other libraries, institutions and all the donors, big and small who reached into their pockets it was a very, very special achievement. It's a fantastic thing that the nation has seen saved. You feel a tingled on your spine as these things have survived and now come home. The Bronte material that had been allocated to the Parsonage arrived in Howard in July. The moment when we unpacked it it was just incredible. It was really quite emotional and I think quite a lot of the staff were really quite overcome but one of the treasures which is now at the Parsonage is this tiny volume and these are meant to look like printed books like the kind of books such as Blackwood's Magazine which came into the Parsonage and was read avidly by all the donors. This was part of a sequence of six such tiny books and we knew that the final missing volume was part of the Honors Field Library so when the collection came to light we've now been able to retrieve this little book and return it to Howard where it was written on where we can display it along with the five other volumes so it's completed that whole series. So I'm working in the Manuscripts Department at the British Library and we were allocated some fantastic objects and they are now with other Bronte material they can be compared and studied within their small group and actually with wider objects within the library. One of the really star items that we got from the Honors Field Library is Emily Bronte's own copy of Poems by Curra, Ellis and Acton Bell which is the sister's first publication together when they were still writing anonymously. It's really, really special because she has gone all the way through and she's written the date that she composed each of her poems so that gives us really amazing knowledge that we haven't ever had before. You almost never get to find out the exact date when someone wrote something and I think that will just be really important for researchers going forward what she was doing on those specific days and why she might have been inspired to write particular poems. She seemed really buttoned up from her handwriting and yet she wrote Weathering Heights which is just crazy and I just thought the incredible contrast of that you don't get it until you actually see it. The copy of Shirley that we got from the Honors Field Library is really fascinating I think so it has a letter from Charlotte Bronte bound inside it and so it's from Charlotte, her editor, saying the book is now finished, thank God which I think is like a really humanizing moment. And she was saying I have no idea if this is any good or not and when I read that I thought it's exactly how I feel when I'm finishing a novel and it just amused me that 150 years before another writer was saying exactly the same thing. It's just the same thing going on over and over again, I love it, I love it so it was, they were really concrete reminders that they're just like us maybe 150 years ago but they're like us. It's very exciting for scholars to be able to come and work here at the Brotherton Collection with these kinds of manuscripts and also these texts. I think that's a very nice story in the manuscript material where you particularly see the sisters developing as writers when one of the lovely things is one of Charlotte's little books where she's really beginning to think about how she might present herself as a more mature author. Charlotte has this wonderful opening line where she says, reader, I'll tell you what my heart is like to break. She's a wonderful prefiguring of that famous line from Jane Eyre where she says, reader, I married him. So you can just hear that voice emerging from this very early text. So these tell us a great deal about the writers and about their relationships and also what feeds into their imaginative lives as writers. To actually have these manuscripts back at Albersford I think is really important. The main things in Honoursville for Scott are the manuscript of Rob Roy is one of the most famous of his novels and then the fragment of the manuscript of his first long narrative poem The Lee of the Lost Minstrel. So this is the manuscript of the Lee of the Lost Minstrel, Scott's first long narrative poem. So it's absolutely wonderful to have a sense of this poem and just how he's working at this early stage in his career. As if I were with Scott's manuscripts there's not a great deal of alteration but we can't see some changes in the words. We can see him just stretching trying to work out the right word for what he's trying to say and what he's trying to describe and so we can see him scoring out words adding new phrases. So it's absolutely fantastic to see this. When you see on a page where a writer has made alterations and they've made changes you can almost see their brain working as part of the creative process. I think that's really important. It reminds us that these writers from the past actually were people who were working thinking carefully about what they were composing thinking about it and trying to get their thoughts down on paper. So you feel really close to the writer at that point. The two Austin letters that were part of this collection are fabulous and they are wonderful communicators of her voice her actual voice. This letter here is letter number two on display and the first line it says at length of the day has come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom LaFroy and we do have it displayed with a portrait miniature of the man himself. This letter is letter 87 so written much later in Austin's life and it follows her in her adventures around London and it is a wonderful gazetteer of her time in London and the places she goes and it's a real relic of everyday life. This is where letters like this and the collections held in museums and libraries and the tree houses are so important to bringing authors' pasts to life. To be able to purchase those letters and bring them back to the house where she sat and wrote her books, her letters as you look at Jane Austen's letter and you see the table she's written it on and you hear the openness and candour of her personality and you almost feel that she's in the room. The piece from the collection that most invigorated and excited me when it came out was the first column place book. It's one of the most important pieces of writing that Burns produced in his life that was still in private hands. What we see here is Burns' poetic development so a lot of the works that are in here didn't actually make it into the Kimarnock edition of his poems but what we can see is Burns testing things out seeing what's working, what isn't working and honing his poetic craft. Among the other highlights that we have is the only surviving letter that Robert Burns wrote to his father. It's an interesting letter because it gives us an insight into Burns' mental state at this point. He's suffering probably from some kind of depression and he actually likes his father and says that poverty and obscurity await him and this is what he thinks his legacy is going to be and obviously we know that it's very different from that. With some of the Burns materials kind of coming home it's coming back to where it started and where potentially it belongs. And this area but also the general kind of Ayrshire region are really influential on him throughout his career and throughout his life and they come up again and again in his work. We've got a fragment of the poem The Briggs of Air which I really like because it's got that really direct personal connection to where we are just now. It's a sort of argument between the two bridges and basically the old bridge says to the new well I'm going to outlive you and I'm going to be standing here a hundred years after you are and that kind of thing. I like that you can see bits where they've scored things out or they've smudged the ink. You can look at one button to point next to another and see that he's written one really fast or that he's written one on the back of something else and you kind of get a sense of that kind of need to write things down as well and it just makes them more human, more real. These names, Austin, Bronte, Bern, Scott they are iconic and seeing their written works seeing their products coming from their hands it enables us to realise that they were real people and that they were creating that they sat, they laboured over a desk over a table to create these masterpieces. There's something about being in close proximity with objects from the past that almost work as a kind of portal to past experience or into the minds of people from an earlier age. To know that this was held by Robert Burns or this was a paper that was written on by Sir Walter Scott it brings that immediacy and that contact. Working on manuscripts is the closest I ever feel to a writer as if I'm almost touching the past in some kind of way. You know, you feel that you are reaching out to almost to a living person when you look at a manuscript. There's something about having the actual object in the actual room and thinking there's some DNA there that's Charlotte Brantes and I'm getting to see it. There are things that they possess that the digital can never replace their smell, their weight, their texture. Every time I handle those objects I notice something different I want to ask more questions I want to learn more and I want to share share these objects with people as well because they're absolutely incredible. The tangibility of them is really important and maybe more important than we realize. These letters, these manuscripts the astonishing things in this collection serve as a reminder that actually all you need is your brain and a pencil and you too can create these extraordinary worlds that last for centuries. The crucial question when you save an archive is what does it matter? And I think these crucial building blocks to our understanding of the creativity and the sense of history pulsating before you. Sparks fly when historical items come together in new ways so I hope they'll just be a renewed sense of excitement about the possibilities of literature and just the inspiration of seeing the handwriting, the written hand words on a page, pen and ink on paper and honestly nothing beats that. What the Friends of the National Library's campaign did was introduce, really at the commercial stage introduced cooperation in place of competition. So I was enormously proud to be chairman of Friends of the National Library's and I think it's altered our perception of what we can do for ourselves and the wider cultural world. It's unheard of really for us to work across all these institutions in that way small museums, large universities, public institutions and we do collaborative projects of course but nothing of this scale. The fact that people came together so quickly to make sure this collection was saved I felt was really impressive but also a real affirmation of the value of literature and the value that people place on literature. We all believe in preserving valuable important works of literature and unique items and we all believe in sharing them as much as we can with everybody. What Friends of the National Library's key mission is is to save these treasures and to share them with the nation and that's what's been so exciting. One of the great things about this project is just that it was a success that it happened and I think that sets a sort of benchmark for the future that where there's a will there's a way. When we work collectively rather than in competition with each other wonderful things can be achieved. This will now galvanise all of us involved to create opportunities for people to come and visit. We can say if you're coming to Scotland go to the Burns Cottage or also go to Abbotsford or Bronte Parsonage if you've been excited by this why not go and see Jane Austen's house or Leith University and see these connections so in actual fact it just shows the power of partnership it's really unlocked for us and surely we can do more in this way. It gives us the confidence to celebrate our cultural heritage and also the revenue and creative potential that lies inside the public ownership of this material. There's every sort of people who come to pay homage to enjoy the sense of being at a place where great works of art were lived, were worked, were created and existed. Our grandchildren, great-grandchildren they'll be able to access it and be inspired by it too. Its legacy is is itself isn't it? It is its legacy, it's a great cultural legacy and it will be with us for all time. Once items are in national public collections they're there forever they belong to us all. We don't know what these will tell people we don't know the questions that future scholars will come and ask of these objects and text but we know that there's a very rich treasure trove of material here for future scholars to mine. Unbelievable treasures came out of the darkness and we brought them back into the light, back into public ownership where they are now spread across Britain. These objects, these letters, these books have gone ahead.