History of the Project
Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters will digitally present the surviving correspondence of Romantic poet, writer, and editor Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). (Read more about Hunt here.)
With interest rising in Hunt and his many correspondents, the autograph letters are priceless source material for scholars of literature, history, opera, the visual arts, theatre, journalism, and politics. The primary goals of Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters are to make Hunt’s correspondence durable and easily accessible to a broad audience through digitization.
The project has several phases. The first brings together digital images of the 1,600 letters in the Brewer-Hunt Collection at The University of Iowa Libraries with previous cataloging. Unpublished transcripts made by David Cheney, held by The University of Toledo Libraries, are added to the digital letters to make them keyword searchable, more legible, and provide additional context. We are also gradually adding transcripts written by other scholars as we receive permission to include them..
The second phase will add information collected by Dr. Cheney about letters in other repositories and published in other, incomplete, editions of Hunt’s letters. We have already made initial contact with some other institutions with Hunt holdings and expect to soon begin adding images from a few of them. Once the first phase of the project is completed, we will begin to make plans for phase three, in which we hope to secure and add scans and transcripts of as many of the letters identified in phase two as it is possible to obtain. Phases two and three will require the widespread cooperation of libraries and scholars of the Romantic period.
With the initial eighteen month grant from the Delmas Foundation, the first phase of the project will be completed, making the nearly 1,600 letters in the Brewer-Leigh Hunt collection digitally and comprehensively accessible by uniting transcripts, description, and metadata. Completing this phase will allow us to move on, if additional funding can be found, to the second and third phases of the project, which will focus on the incorporation of Hunt letters from other repositories.
Unlike any previously published collection of Hunt’s letters, Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters does not merely reproduce the content of the letters, but instead provides facsimile images of the autograph letters. In this way, we open access to the rare and often fragile objects kept in Special Collections in a documentary way, while also endowing scholarly experience and criticism by allowing the intense examination of “bibliographic codes” (Jerome McGann), or physical traits that become part of the literary work. Often overlooked features, such as the spatial layout of the page, the color and size of the paper, the type of ink, and even the legibility of handwriting are all insightful components of the correspondence that are lost if one does not have access to the original physical artifact.
In addition to examining the letter as a physical object, images of the letters also allow each individual user to scrutinize the original content of the letter. Although transcripts are included to aid in legibility and keyword searching capability, an image of the original letter is present for comparison and personal interpretation.
Meticulously transcribing letters requires a large commitment of time, as well as a comprehensive knowledge of authors (and their handwriting styles). The University of Toledo Libraries has in its possession an ideal transcription aid in the papers of David Cheney, an Iowa PhD, who devoted much of his life to locating and transcribing all the Hunt letters known to be in existence. He intended to publish an edited edition of Hunt’s complete correspondence. Unfortunately, Cheney passed away in 2006 before his work could be realized.
The University of Toledo has loaned Cheney’s typed transcripts to Iowa for scanning and OCR purposes. Cheney’s transcripts reflect spelling, capitalization, and punctuation anomalies present in the original letters. Additionally, Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters recognizes and productively disseminates Cheney’s unpublished scholarly work. The University of Iowa Libraries has received permission from Cheney’s wife, Patricia Cheney, to make his work available. Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters fills a gap in Hunt scholarship by integrating Cheney’s editorial work with unedited access to the original autograph letters. We have also been fortunate to gain permission from Eleanor M. Gates and Anne Skagen to make use of Gates’ transcripts from Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters. Brent Kinser of the Carlyle Letters Online has also graciously allowed us to use some of his transcripts for letters to and from the Carlyles.
The last component of the Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters involves metadata. With the library’s digital object manager software, CONTENTdm, metadata fields can be designated for keyword searching, thereby offering different access points to the letters. Descriptive metadata (e.g., author, date, summary of contents) is culled from the original catalog cards to appear alongside the digital facsimile. The metadata component of the digital record presents all of the information on the physical cards in a searchable way.
Each letter’s metadata record also cites where the letter has been published, allowing valuable resources such as Eleanor M. Gates’ recent work (1998) on Hunt letters to be noted, in addition to less obvious resources. To make the interface easy to navigate, the transcript is included in a metadata field and thus will be immediately apparent. Administrative and technical metadata (e.g., resolution, rights management) are present with each piece of correspondence as well in order to ensure visibility of the contributing institutions and their contact information for further access and image use rights.
