Finding Two Missing Thornton Manuscripts

Blog article published by Cordelia Beattie on 23 June 2022  manuscripts

‘Are you interested in the manuscript of Alice Thornton's diary?’ This was the text that I got from my dad one evening in autumn 2018. I didn’t get too excited initially as I thought my dad might be referring to a copy of Jackson’s 1875 edition of Thornton’s writings, as he himself is largely interested in twentieth-century history. But he then sent me an image of the tiny book that his friend had showed him in their local pub over an early evening drink.

I got my partner to put the children to bed while I did a quick look up of Thornton’s manuscripts, starting with the valuable resource that is the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM) . This suggested that a few of Thornton’s manuscripts were currently untraced, with the only ones accounted for being the two acquired by the British Library in 2009.

I asked my dad for a few more details: how many pages does the book have? What size is it? From the replies, I suspected that it was the book described by Jackson as ‘a small memorandum book three and a half by two and a half inches in size, and consisting of about 196 pages, which has the appearance of having been Mrs. Thornton's original “Booke of Remembrances”’.^[1] My dad’s friend said I was welcome to come and look at it, which I did as soon as there was a break in the teaching semester.

But in the meantime, my dad told me that his friend – Patrick Comber – had a chest full of family papers, many about Dean Thomas Comber (1645-99) and Patrick would like to know more about them. I decided to research Dean Comber as a thank you to Patrick for allowing me to see Thornton’s book. And it was this that led me to the second Thornton manuscript. Durham Cathedral Library had a collection, gifted to them in 1969, catalogued as Dean Comber’s papers and - in the very general catalogue entry which noted there were ‘c.20 volumes and 1 box’ there was reference to ‘a journal of his wife Alice’. Knowing that there was at least one other Thornton manuscript still untraced, I wondered if this might be another of Alice’s books. If not, a book by her daughter (Alice Comber née Thornton) was nevertheless interesting. I decided a trip to Durham was also necessary.

While attending a conference in Durham, I booked into the library at 5 The College (accessed through the beautiful cloisters of Durham Cathedral), which is where Dean Comber’s papers are stored. In the morning I ordered up ‘the box’. This was both exciting and frustrating. In the box was a hand-list of what had been donated in 1969 and here the book was described as ‘Part of Mrs Alice Thornton’s memoirs 1668’. The box was full of loose papers and I searched to see if any of these was a part of one of Alice’s books but turned up nothing. At lunch I messaged my dad the good and bad news.

In the afternoon I returned and asked to see the rest of the collection, which I was told was a box of Dean Comber’s printed books. I thought I might possibly find something interesting that I could report back to Patrick. But one of the first volumes I took out of the box was one of Thornton’s books. Not only that, it wasn’t a partial survival but a full volume. The cataloguer has added the words ‘Part of’ not because some of Alice Thornton’s memoirs were missing but because part of the book has been written in by her great, great grandson. Alice’s text is numbered from page 1 to page 291 and then the great, great, grandson’s hand starts on page 292. Eureka! This was the volume she referred to in the British Library manuscripts as ‘my first book of my widowed condition’ and which Jackson had labelled book ii (CELM *ThA 4).

To continue my run of lucky moments, I saw Dr Suzanne Trill as I was getting off the bus on my return from Durham. She immediately grasped the significance of what I had found and we arranged to meet for a coffee. It was at this next meeting that we first discussed putting in a grant application to edit the manuscripts, although submission took about another eighteen months of work, protracted a little by illness, strikes and a global pandemic.

Suzanne asked Professor Raymond Anselment (Connecticut) to compare some of my photos of Patrick’s manuscript with a microfilm held at the Beinecke library and he confirmed that they were the same book, which led us to conclude that this book was actually described twice (as untraced) on the CELM website (*ThA5, *ThA6). This also meant all four Thornton manuscripts that had been available to Jackson in 1875 had been located. And Thornton’s original texts are what we will share with you on this site.

In memory of Patrick Comber, d.2020.