HISTORIC DOCUMENTS IN LONDON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 26 June 1940, Page 2

HISTORIC DOCUMENTS IN LONDON

SHAKESPEARE SPECIALIST HAS 34.000 STORED IN WINE CELLAR [By Air Mail—Special Correspondent] LONDON, Bth June. Many learned societies and museum? have removed their documents from London but Mr Alan Keen, a specialist in Shakespearean research, who has .taken over the old Gate House of Clifford’s Inn. just off Fleet Street, is keeping 30.000 parchments, books and documents there—most of them in the huge wine cellar. “I would keep more thhn 30,000 here,” he said this week, “but there is no room. My collection of manuscripts of historic and literary value run into more than 500,000 items, including the autographs of practically all the great Elizabethan poets and playwrights. “Space being restricted here, most of the stock is kept at my two other muniment rooms in Edgware and Richmond. But whatever articles I need at the moment 1 keen here. I have not the least fear of air-raid damage, because I have the most complete confidence in the safety of London. “I keep my unique Bronte collection here. It includes a French exercisebook of Charlotte Bronte, which she used at her school in Brussels in 1842 and 1843. “And here is the Virgil used by her ne’er-do-well brother Patrick, with a drawing of a boxer on the flyleaf. This book came from Haworth Parsonage. “Here is one of the few existing copies of Charlotte Bronte’s suppressed book, the ‘Letters to Ellen Hussey,’ to which Charlotte's husband, a typical Victorian nonentity named Nicholls, took some inexplicable objection.”