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The Hockliffe Project has been designed to promote the study of early British children's literature. It provides internet access to the Hockliffe Collection of Early Children's Books, located in Bedford in the UK. This website contains a catalogue of the Collection along with digital images of many of the books, plus bibliographical information and critical and contextualising essays. The Project’s aim is to facilitate a re-evaluation of children's literature in its own infancy, and to let these rich and varied books speak for themselves.
Please note that not all of the books in the Collection have been digitised.
The main point of access to the digitised images of the books in the Hockliffe Collection is through the catalogue. You can view the catalogue by following the link in the drop-down box at the left of the tool-bar above.
Clicking on the blue catalogue numbers at the left of each entry in the catalogue will take you to a fuller bibliographical record of the book. If the check-box next to the catalogue contains a tick, full page images of the whole book are currently available. You will be able to see these by following a link from the full bibliographical record page.
Throughout the website, books in the Hockliffe Collection are specified by their four-digit catalogue number. It should be noted that the electronic catalogue is not yet complete, but does detail most of the Collection. So far, only some of the books in the Collection have been digitised.
Alternatively, you can access texts from the Collection by using the search facility, also located in the tool-bar.
To view a general essay introducing eighteenth and nineteenth-century children's literature, or the Hockliffe Project's contacts and links pages, please follow the link in the drop-down box on the left of the tool-bar.
The Hockliffe Collection is a unique cache of over a thousand British children's books dating predominantly from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were originally collected by Frederic Hockliffe (1833-1914), a Bedford publisher and bookseller. In 1927 his eldest son, Frederic Rich Hockliffe (1861-1929), bookseller and mayor of Bedford, donated the collection to Bedford Training College. This later became Bedford College of Higher Education, then part of De Montfort University and is currently owned by the University of Bedfordshire. The Collection itself is housed in the Polhill Library of the University of Bedfordshire.
The books in the Hockliffe Collection range in date from 1685 to the mid-twentieth century, although the majority were published between 1760 and 1840. The collection is not comprehensive, but it is representative of the wide range of writing for children in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are fables, nursery tales and stories, and there are books of instruction and religious works. There are periodicals and books of poetry, and there are alphabets, spelling books and battledores. There are chapbooks and ballads, mathematical, geographical, historical and scientific books, and toy-books, game-books, and books with moveable parts. The books vary enormously in size and shape as well as in the quality of paper and printing. Bindings, generally original, are very diverse too. Most of the books contain illustrations of some sort, often hand-coloured. Above all, perhaps, the Hockliffe Collection is interesting because it has been used. Many of the books are marked in some way, with indications of ownership or comments scrawled in margins. There is wear on some of the books which testifies to heavy use. Equally interesting is that some books appear to have been either little used or treated with great care.
The project ran between 1999 and 2002, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. It was undertaken by a team of academics from the English Department and Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University. The website was created by Matthew Grenby, who now works in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. In 2012, the original site was reconfigured, repairing various problems and providing many new sets of images.
This page is maintained by Matthew Grenby and was last updated on 21 May 2012. Any questions about the page should be addressed to him at m.o.grenby@ncl.ac.uk.
Copyright © 2001, 2012 M. O. Grenby