An Archival Adventure: Discovering the Reeves Collection in the Bodleian Library

In my Introduction to Volume 5 of my Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 series, I narrated the story of how I uncovered the missing section of the Marjorie Reeves collection.  I would like to include that portion of my Introduction here because it provides a fitting glimpse into the fragility of manuscripts, both as individual artifacts and as donated collections, and offers useful lessons for scholars, both young and old, in perseverance, persistence, and curiosity when approaching uncatalogued manuscript collections.

Jennifer Thorp, the former archivist at the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, first introduced me to the Steele Collection in 1999, when I was checking on a reference to a Joseph Cottle in one of the letters in that collection. She was in the process of creating the first calendar of the Collection. I discovered that what I was looking for was not a letter by Joseph Cottle of Bristol, friend and publisher of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, but rather his grandfather. After skimming through some letters from Jane Attwater to Mary Steele, composed during the 1770s and ’80s, I made a note to myself that these letters “would be an excellent project” and worth returning to a later date. Little did I know that my failure that day to find what I was looking for would indeed lead to “an excellent project,” the publication more than a decade later of the writings of a remarkable group of Nonconformist women writers that comprise the eight volumes of my series, Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). 

Jennifer Thorp mentioned to me that I might want to meet Marjorie Reeves, a resident of Oxford and former professor at St Anne’s College who had just published, at the age of 92, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700–1900 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). This book provided an overview of a considerable amount of material in the Steele Collection, which had been deposited at the Angus Library in 1992 by Hugh Steele-Smith. Reeves’s book also brought to light a considerable amount of previously unknown material in her own possession, which she had been depositing at various times in the Angus Library throughout the 1990s (these materials are now known as the Reeves Collection, Attwater Papers, and the Saffery/Whitaker Papers, only partially catalogued until I began my work on them in 2007). Some of these materials had appeared previously in her first book on her West Country family history, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1978). Other projects took up my interest and time for the next seven years, and not until 2006 did I turn my attention once again to the Steele Collection. Unfortunately, Reeves died in 2003, and I was never able to meet and discuss my ideas with her, something I deeply regret. I proceeded nevertheless to make a much more thorough exploration of the Steele Collection and the materials left to the Angus Library by Reeves, much of which had not been catalogued. I realized there was far more to this material than Reeves had explored in Pursuing the Muses. 

I reviewed what I thought was all the material used by Reeves in her book and assumed that after her death any material she owned concerning the Steele, Attwater and Saffery families not previously deposited had been left to the library. Based upon that assumption, I presented a proposal in 2007 to Pickering & Chatto to publish a series of volumes based on these materials. In January 2008 I came to Oxford for an extended stay, having been given a leave (I was teaching solely online that semester) to remain in the UK all semester. My first assignment was to make certain that all the materials I wished to include in the volumes that had been seen and commented upon by Reeves had indeed been deposited by her into the Angus Library. However, I quickly discovered that two important manuscript collections of poetry were missing: a chapbook of poems by Marianna Attwater from the late 1760s and a larger bound volume of poems by Maria Grace Saffery from the late 1830s and early 1840s, titled “Lyra Domestica.” Also missing was the complete copy of Anne Steele’s Verses for Children that Reeves clearly had in possession when she composed Pursuing the Muses. 

After searching through all the material left by Reeves in the Angus Library, even asking Thorp (at that time the archivist at New College, Oxford) to assist me in my search of the library’s archives, I came to the conclusion the materials were indeed missing. I contacted the executor of Marjorie Reeves’s estate, Anthony Sheppard, as well as Madeline Barber of Oxford, seeking guidance as to where these missing materials might be. I was surprised to learn that Reeves had not left everything to the Angus Library, as I had assumed, but instead deposited materials at St Anne’s College and the Bodleian. I immediately went to the library at St Anne’s and examined a large collection of manuscripts and printed sources left by Reeves, but found nothing pertaining to the West Country women writers I was seeking. I contacted two archivists at the Bodleian, but received no response. After several weeks, I went to the Special Collections at the Bodleian to see if I could find someone who knew about Marjorie Reeves and the collection of materials she had left with the library. This would prove a fateful day indeed in my quest for the missing portion of the Reeves Collection. 

I met Colin Harris, at that time superintendent of Reading Rooms and Special Collections at the Bodleian, and he informed me that the archivists I had previously contacted had retired, which explained their lack of response to my query. Fortunately, he said I had found the right person, for he did indeed know about the Reeves deposit and was fairly sure he could find it for me. He said the collection was not a priority for the Bodleian and had been set apart for removal to a storage facility where it would have been unlikely it would have ever seen the light of day. To see if we could keep that from happening, Harris took me into a large room in the middle of what is now the former New Bodleian building. The cavernous room was filled with stacks of uncatalogued material, only a fraction, he informed me, of the totality of uncatalogued holdings belonging to the Bodleian. We began our search along the right-hand wall, looking for a box with a piece of paper attached to it marked “Reeves.”  After a few minutes, we came to a box marked “Reeves.” Mr. Harris asked me if this was the right one, and I replied that I was not certain but a quick examination would reveal the answer. As I looked at the top box, I immediately saw in Marjorie Reeves’s hand an envelope marked “Saffery poems, Lyra Domestica.” That was all I needed to know; we had indeed found the missing portion of the Reeves Collection. The boxes were in poor condition and the materials extremely disorganized. Reeves had placed the precious materials into hundreds of envelopes, adding identifying notes above the address labels. Manuscript letters, including many she had used in Pursuing the Muses, were folded and placed into envelopes, with hundreds of letters from the early and mid-nineteenth century left in large bundles having never been opened, complete with Queen Victoria stamps. Reeves had left the Bodleian six boxes of material. 

I asked if I could examine the boxes and Mr. Harris decided that, given the situation, he would allow me to do so and placed them on a shelf behind the desk in the Manuscripts Room and instructed the staff that during my stay in Oxford that spring, I would be the only person allowed to handle these boxes, a situation and privilege I had never expected when I landed at Gatwick a few weeks earlier. I proceeded to make a thorough examination of each box, locating all the manuscript letters pertaining to the women writers I wanted to use in my volumes and all their manuscript poems. I eventually found Marianna Attwater’s book of poems, and several days later, in the last box and last envelope I opened, the only extant complete copy of Anne Steele’s Verses for Children. At this point I had finally completed the checklist I had begun in the Angus Library, discovering along the way a significant body of new material I did not know existed, material Reeves did not mention and did not use in her book but which I knew was important to telling the entire story of this remarkable coterie of West Country women writers. Probably the most important of these unknown materials was the separate section of Jane Attwater’s diary that she had devoted to the final two months of her daughter’s life in 1809, a stunning work of life-writing that would have been lost to posterity had I not showed up unannounced in Colin Harris’s office in early 2008 in search of the missing Reeves Collection.

I was now confronted by two large collections of material in two libraries, the overwhelming majority of which in both libraries was uncatalogued and uncalendared. I proceeded that spring and on successive trips for the next three years to calendar as much as possible all the materials in both libraries. Thanks to the librarians and staff at both the Angus and the Bodleian, I was given boxes, envelopes and plastic sleeves that enabled me to organize, separate, flatten, identify and date hundreds of manuscript letters and poems, preserving in many cases some very fragile material. I created a system in which to organize and identify all the materials in these collections, a task that took several years of work during my visits to the UK. Overall, the letters that Marjorie Reeves deposited to the Angus Library were in better condition than those she left with the Bodleian. Why Reeves decided to split the collection between the two libraries is unknown and somewhat inexplicable, for her decision created considerable difficulties in organizing and identifying the correspondence between Maria Grace Andrews Saffery and her sister Anne Andrews Whitaker, as well as correspondence by other individuals, and the poetry of Maria Saffery, all of which appear in Volumes 6, 7, and 8 of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840. 

When you examine at my “Combined Chronological Calendar of the the Letters of the Saffery and Whitaker Families," you will see that the letters were not divided according to a logical pattern, with the citations from my combined calendar jumping repeatedly from one library to the next. The letters deposited at the Angus were better organized and preserved than those at the Bodleian due to some preliminary work performed by Thorp. All of the material left by Marjorie Reeves at both libraries pertaining to the individuals appearing in these volumes has now been calendared and can be accessed on this site by clicking here, here, and here. The Bodleian even printed my combined Calendar and it resides now in the Reading Room in Rare Books and Manuscripts, quite an honor for someone with no training as an archivist. I also completed considerable genealogical research (much of it indebted to the work of Reeves, John Broome and Serena McLaren, a descendant of Maria Saffery) on the Steele, Attwater, Whitaker and Saffery families, which can be found on this site at “Steele Circle: Selected Genealogies.” A massive amount of material related to the Victorian generation of these families, however, remains uncalendared in both libraries, a quest I will gladly leave for another scholar to perform. 

Timothy Whelan