Visiting archives, and reading literary manuscripts is one of the high pleasures of life, and the extraordinary fact is - in Britain, at least, and, in my experience, in the USA - that access to these treasures is usually pretty easy. The Manuscript Room at the British Library yields up wonder after wonder. In the Royal Archive at Windsor, I was allowed to see vast quantities of Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s letters and papers. One of the most satisfying, and comic, moments of my research at Windsor was when the archivist said - apropos of the Albert papers - “I think you’ve read all there is!” It can’t quite be true, but after years of researching The Prince Consort, it felt like it.
But, exciting as all this was, I do not think I have ever felt such excitement as when, one autumn day in 2018, in the Bodleian Library, I was allowed a
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