Letters to Clare
Letters to Clare
Durham University
Project Overview
Project owner: Dr. Adam Bridgen, Department of English Studies, Durham University
Funding requested: 1400GBP
Project Details
The Poet
Northamptonshire peasant-poet and nature writer, John Clare (1793–1864) is a significant figure in Romantic-era literary studies, whose influence on nature writing is still felt to this day. Clare studies have been booming since the 1990s, with Clare’s writing being seen as particularly relevant for re-envisioning our relationship with the natural world, with George Monbiot calling him “the poet of the environmental crisis — 200 years ago.”
An inspiration to writers and artists to this day, he is a subject of regular works of reinterpretation and performance, such as the 2015 film By Our Selves, starring Toby Jones. The John Clare Society hosts an annual festival in his birthplace and the John Clare Cottage museum preserves the material record of his life and work for the general public.
Clare has been the subject of several monographs, a biography by Sir Jonathan Bate, as well as nearly 500 articles in the last three decades. His works and letters have appeared in several scholarly editions. The Letters of John Clare, published in 1986, remains the largest collection of his correspondence. However, the other side of Clare’s correspondence — the letters sent to him — has yet to be made available.
The Task
This project aims to transcribe, edit, and publish around 1200 letters that Clare received over the course of his life. These letters—mostly in the British Library and in local archives—are a major resource, still largely untapped, one which if brought into the light would greatly enhance our knowledge of Clare’s life, literary development and interactions. The edition is currently under review with Liverpool University Press, with the expected publication in 2030.
We have transcribed the majority of the letters and digitised them using OCR (optical character recognition). Our task now is to quality check the digitisations, formatting them and correcting any machine errors, or errors in the original transcriptions. This correction process is time-consuming: for example, proofing 100 pages takes around 20 hours. To correct the entire 1700 pages of transcriptions would, on that basis, take around 340 hours in total. This is a substantial task requiring attention to detail, familiarity with early 19th-century scripts, and an ability to work independently with the letters while reporting issues to and keeping in regular communication with the project leads.
The project is led by Dr. Adam Bridgen, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellow in Durham University’s English Department, in collaboration with Prof. Tim Fulford (De Montfort University).
The Benefits
The research assistant’s close involvement in the production of a major scholarly edition from a world-class publisher will provide them with a strong set of skills in editing, self-directed work with historical materials, scholarly writing and the digitisation of information on which to build their subsequent career. The project investigators would manage the RA on the basis of fortnightly meetings, discussing their work on the transcriptions and the RA’s training needs.
Beyond these transferrable skills, the RA would also gain a deeper appreciation for Clare’s literary networks and contemporary reception. The RA would be among the first few individuals to work with this archive, a significant opportunity should they wish to undertake further study of Clare as part of their graduate or postgraduate studies. Depending on the duration of the Research Assistant’s tenure, the project team be able to support them to deliver a paper deriving from their work, and to write an article should they wish to follow up on any findings.
1400GBP would fund a research assistant, who is a postgraduate in English, ideally an MPhil or PhD candidate but not necessarily so, to work for 100 hours at the Real Living Wage.