In one illustration, painted on vellum and decorated with gold leaf, the sorcerer Merlin is depicted as a powerful shape-shifter who has transformed into a talking stag. In another, the Knights of the Round Table are shown returning, victorious, from battle.

The illustrations appear in one of the earliest manuscripts to tell the tale of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail – a richly illuminated medieval tome which, for more than 700 years, has been in private hands.

Now, institutions will have an opportunity to buy the work, which has never been publicly exhibited or comprehensively studied, when it is offered for sale at auction by Christie’s for an estimated £1.5m to £2m in July.

Dating from c1290 to 1310, the manuscript contains texts from the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle – the foundational myths of King Arthur, Merlin and the holy grail – and 126 miniature illustrations, including a rare depiction of Merlin as a stag.

Only three such manuscripts are known to be held in private collections, said Dr Eugenio Donadoni, director of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at Christie’s, which is selling the work in its valuable books and manuscripts sale on 8 July: “Ours is the earliest of the three and the most profusely illustrated. Its text is unique.”

Known as the Lebaudy manuscript, after it was collected by the French industrialist Jean Lebaudy in the 20th century, it is thought to be the earliest copy of the Lancelot-Grail cycle ever to appear at auction.

“Many of the miniatures are in burnished gold, [created] using gold leaf, which was polished very aggressively to make it shine,” said Donadoni.

The manuscript is thought to have been produced at the end of the 13th century by the Master of the Liège Apocalypse, an anonymous but distinctive artist and illuminator named after the apocalyptic religious manuscript he was best known for. “He evidently was very sought after because the manuscripts he produced were very rich and would have cost a lot of money to make,” said Donadoni. “He’s got a very characteristic style and does these square-jawed male faces and lovely red dots on the cheeks of his characters.”

Previous owners of the manuscript have included a 15th-century knight, a jouster who died young, and the obsessive medievalist and bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps, while Lebaudy fought in two world wars and twice won the croix de guerre. “You can see how, throughout history, this manuscript might have appealed to these people,” Donadoni said.

Dr Irene Fabry-Tehranchi, who specialises in French texts at Cambridge University Library, said it was “amazing” to think that the Labaudy manuscript was being sold and could enter public ownership for the first time. “It’s really exciting. This private ownership of a key medieval manuscript is a real challenge for scholars. It prevents further research, unfortunately.”

Scholars have been unable to study the entire manuscript and its illustrations in depth, she said, because it has, perhaps understandably, been an object of desire for the super-rich. “It’s a beautifully illuminated manuscript, which contains wonderful Arthurian stories depicted in exquisite miniatures. Originally, it was made for aristocratic patrons, possibly women who were very fond of Arthurian stories.”

Now, she said, the manuscript is part of “our world heritage” and she is keeping her fingers crossed that, seven centuries later, the pattern of ownership can be broken. “I hope that … it will finally become available in a public collection. The problem is, of course, that nowadays libraries and heritage institutions don’t have very much money. [But] these institutions are there to preserve these texts and to make them publicly available.”

After examining scans of the manuscript, she said the ending of a classic story, known as the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, has been abridged and rewritten so that it presents a “special version” of the text.

“[At the end of] the standard version of the story, you have the development of knightly adventures and romance, and also a shift in focus from King Arthur to his nephew, the knight Gawain, and his adventures,” she said. “In the reworked version, I believe, of the Lebaudy manuscript – although we need to look at it more closely – we have more of a focus on the battles of Arthur and questions of kingship.”

This “different” ending better reflects the opening of the tale, where the king seeks to affirm his legitimacy while facing rebel British barons and fighting Saxon invaders.

“In some cases, scribes thought they could rewrite the story and make it more appealing to what either their patrons wanted or in a way that felt better [to them] – that was a standard medieval writing practice. It was probably someone’s initiative to do this rewriting, because they thought it was best,” she said. “It shows the scribe’s own take on the story.”

He was a reclusive author, who revealed little about himself or the inspiration for his 1951 masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye. Now letters that JD Salinger wrote to his editor have come to light for the first time, offering significant insights, literary and personal.

A previously unpublished correspondence reveals the author’s intervention over how he and his novel would be presented and his unease about his writing being viewed through an ethnic or religious lens.

When Salinger emerged in the early 1950s as one of the most influential literary voices of his generation, one personal detail was conspicuously absent from his public profile: his Jewish and Irish Catholic heritage. That omission was not accidental, the letters show.

In the final stages of production for The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger asked his editor, John Woodburn, to remove his “Jewish-Irishness” from the book jacket. He wrote: “I don’t know that I’d like to have that Jewish-Irish business slapped on the jacket … Surely it’s as bad to advertise worthy information as it is to withhold it – if it’s catchy, that is.

“Second-rate reviewers would probably find the information just provocative enough to use and misuse over and over again and I’d end up being expected to wear a Star of David and a Shamrock on the back of my sweatshirt. So, please, let’s be careful.”

Salinger signed off: “Yours, Jerry”. Woodburn’s reply, which has survived on a carbon copy alongside Salinger’s letters, confirms that he had agreed to the request.

The first-edition dust jacket bears no reference to the author’s cultural or religious lineage, noting only that he was born in New York City. The correspondence – which includes an autograph postcard and two typed letters – has been acquired from a private collector by Peter Harrington Rare Books, a leading antiquarian bookseller, in London.

Sammy Jay, its senior specialist, said: “It’s very exciting to have letters of consequence from a major writer, particularly ones that are revelatory for their books and their intentions around them. For Salinger, this is really rare because he was very private. Occasionally, you see a letter here or there, but ones where he’s actually writing about his books are very unusual.

“This exchange provides the clearest primary-source documentation yet of Salinger’s resistance to biographical framing and his determination to control how his identity intersected with his work.”

Salinger once described publishing as a “terrible invasion of my privacy” and this correspondence reflects his wish “to separate authorial identity from textual interpretation”, Jay added.

In these letters, Salinger also discussed an unpublished “long story” involving “three brothers from the novel,” a reference to The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, his prequel to Catcher, which has long fascinated his fans because Salinger suddenly cancelled its publication, stipulating in his will that it must remain unpublished.

That restriction remains in place until 50 years after his death in 2010 although, in 2013, the prequel was leaked from Princeton University Library, where it had been held, and pirated editions circulated online.

“Holden doesn’t actually appear,” Salinger wrote to Woodburn, “but his name comes up so often, and so importantly, that he’s really in the story.” Holden Caulfield is the fictional disaffected New York teenager who is the protagonist and narrator of The Catcher in the Rye.

Jay said that, in this unpublished letter, Salinger was giving his editor a sense of the story that he was expecting to edit: “He tells him that Holden doesn’t appear, but that he haunts this story too. In his short stories and novels, he weaves together a lot of characters, all loosely part of the same world, and so it’s nice to see that he has the same intentions for this other story that he then retracted.”

Salinger is known to have become a recluse after publishing The Catcher in the Rye, refusing rights to adapt it for Broadway or Hollywood. But, even before its publication, Woodburn’s letter notes, in a jocular tone, that he wanted to coax him from his “hermit’s life in Westport [Connecticut]”.

The correspondence will be presented by Peter Harrington at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens on 30 April.

Eight original handwritten letters from the Romantic poet John Keats to his muse and “one passion”, Fanny Brawne, were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former US ambassador to the UK, on Monday after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s.

Keats’s letters, including the first letter he ever wrote to Brawne, are dated between 1819 and 1820. Valued at approximately $2m, the 37 letters are held in a gilt morocco-bound portfolio. Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.

Among Keats’s most famous poems are his 1819 odes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn, which form a cornerstone of Romantic poetry. But his letters to Brawne – in which his romantic longing is twinned with melancholy – stand among his most memorable.

Brawne became Keats’s fiancee but he died from tuberculosis in February 1821 at the age of 25. At her death in 1865, Brawne bequeathed the letters to her children, who sold them at auction in 1885. Their sale inspired Oscar Wilde to write a sonnet, On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters.

The portfolio was discovered among 17 rare books that resurfaced in Manhattan in January 2025, when an unnamed individual, who later claimed to have inherited the books from his grandfather, attempted to sell them to two separate rare book dealers, B & B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books. They reported the sale attempt to Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, after discovering the books were listed on the Art Loss Register.

“Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world, home to museums, galleries, and dealers displaying incredible artworks and antiquities,” Bragg said in a statement. “Yet the integrity of this marketplace is undermined when stolen items are on display. We will not allow our borough to be a center for trafficked art and antiquities.”

The books were then seized pursuant to search warrants, and earlier this year a New York supreme court judge authorized the books to be turned over to the heirs of John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Whitney.

The books include a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from 1939; four letters by Wilde that were not included in De Profundis; the letters Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, from Reading Gaol during his imprisonment for “gross indecency”; and a copy of White Stains by the occultist Aleister Crowley from 1898.

Whitney’s heirs have said the books, valued collectively at nearly $3m, will be sold and the proceeds donated.

Little is known about the theft, but at some time between 1982 and 1989, at least 28 of the books were stolen from Whitney’s Long Island estate, and the police were contacted. Whitney, who served as US ambassador from 1957 to 1961 and was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, was known as an avid art collector and inherited hundreds of rare books from his mother.

The discovery and return of the books was handled by Manhattan’s antiquities trafficking unit, led by Matthew Bogdanos, a former Marine colonel who has headed the office for more than a decade. The ATU has now recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, works of art and antiquities, valued at more than $485m, and returned more than 5,900 of those to their owners or countries of origin.

In 2017, Bogdanos ordered the seizure of a 2,300-year-old vase known as the Python Vessel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years later, more than a dozen artifacts linked to the trafficker Subhash Kapoor were seized from a gallery at Yale university.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2022, Bogdanos said that dealers, private collectors and museums lived for years on the fence on the subject of illicit antiquities.

“They’d say, ‘Oh it’s a little dodgy, but who cares. Nobody’s looking.’ But people are looking, and they’re saying it’s not worth it.” He added that trafficking in stolen antiquities “used to be a gentlemen’s sport done by gentlemen for gentlemen. Now these gentlemen and gentlewomen of the trade are getting handcuffed.”

A “once in a century” discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial.

York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called “Hugerl” in the posthumously published poem Glad.

“Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”.

But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023.

The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife, Christa, after they settled in the Lower Austrian countryside in the 1990s and had inherited their belongings after they died of cancer within a year of one another, in 2012 and 2013.

She showed Neundlinger 100 letters that Auden had sent to his lover, some of them also addressed to his spouse. “It’s a once in a century find, the kind of thing a literary historian can only dream of,” says Sandra Mayer, a cultural historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has spent the last two years digitising the letters with her colleague Timo Frühwirth, and went public with the discovery last week.

Spanning roughly 10 years between the early 1960s and 1970s, they are written in enthusiastically colloquial – if frequently misspelt and agrammatical – German.

Auden had spent time in Berlin in the late 1920s and later entered a marriage of convenience with the bisexual daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, Erika, to help her gain British citizenship and flee from the Nazis. After a stint in the US, he settled in the Austrian town of Kirchstetten, where he lived until his death in 1973.

The public-school educated poet was in his mid-50s when he met the working-class twentysomething. “Glad our worlds of enchantment / Are so several / Neither is tempted to broach”, Auden later wrote in his poem. “I cannot tell a / Jaguar from a Bentley / And you never read”.

Their relationship appears reminiscent of the famed bond between painter Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer, a gang-affiliated East End petty crook in London. But whereas Dyer breaking into Bacon’s apartment is a modern myth compounded by the Daniel Craig-starring biopic Love Is the Devil, in Auden’s case it was true.

Though Kurka had completed an apprenticeship and was in work, he was struggling for cash. When Auden lent him his Volkswagen Beetle before embarking on a trip to the US, the young man and two accomplices used the vehicle to carry out a series of car burglaries, culminating in a break-in at the poet’s own home.

They were arrested after a police chase, found in possession of stolen goods worth 34,000 Austrian schilling (the equivalent of about €20,000 today) and put on trial.

Since the car was registered in Auden’s name, the court case risked making public the relationship between the young criminal and the writer.

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Auden enjoyed a special status in Austria at the time, says Neundlinger, a curator at the WH Auden Museum in Kirchstetten. “He never hid his homosexuality. But unlike Christopher Isherwood, he was never an activist for gay rights.” Enjoying a high degree of respectability as a professor, the English writer also regularly visited the local church. “He blended in and tried to live a normal life.”

Since same-sex acts were still a criminal offence in Austria, Kurka’s trial risked stirring up controversy around the poet, who had won a Pulitzer in 1948 and was in close contention for the Nobel prize in literature at the time.

An innuendo-filled article in Austrian newspaper Kurier on 16 October 1962 did not name Auden, who had become a dual US-UK citizen in 1946, but referred only to “one of those Americans who got stuck in old Europe with its different, much freer way to live and let live”.

Instead of testifying against Kurka, Auden asked his own longstanding lawyer to recommend a good advocate to defend him. Kurka was sentenced to 15 months in prison, his wife to eight.

“The whole episode was a turning point in their relationship, and a positive one,” says Neundlinger. “Auden did not know whether Kurka would give away intimate information when interviewed by police – the fact that he didn’t seems to have strengthened their ties.”

“Both learned a lesson,” Auden wrote in Glad. “But for which we might still be Strich und Freier” – translated as “streetwalker and john”. None of Kurka’s letters to Auden have been recovered, but in those the poet wrote from trips to New York or Berlin back to Vienna, he is warm and candid. The older man sent Kurka and his wife money to pay for flights to visit him, as well as for English lessons, and complained about feeling abandoned by his partner, the American poet Chester Kallman. “I feel a little bit lonely and wish you were here,” he wrote in November 1964.

“There may have been an idea that their relationship was purely sexual or transactional in nature”, says Neundlinger, but “these letters show they enjoyed a long and intense friendship”.

A “rare, unique and incredibly exciting” collection of original letters and drawings sent between the creators of Winnie-the-Pooh are set to go under the hammer this week, after being discovered in a carrier bag.

The collection includes a series of written exchanges between AA Milne, the author behind the iconic children’s literature character, illustrator EH Shepard and their publisher, Frederick Muller.

The collection belonged to the late Leslie Smith, who founded the publishing company Cressrelles. His company had taken over another publishing company that had been run by the family of Winnie-the-Pooh publisher Frederick Muller, leaving Muller’s letters in Smith’s possession. The letters – some of which had not been seen by anyone since 1926 – were found by Smith’s children while clearing out their father’s loft after his death in November 2023.

Will Farmer, director at Fieldings Auctioneers which is arranging the sale, received the material “about five months ago” when the family were unsure of what to do with it.

Aided by BBC Antiques Roadshow’s Clive Farahar, they combed through the findings, having previously assumed that all documents from the era had been accounted for.

The unearthed archive contains first-draft manuscripts of works by Milne such as his poem Wind on the Hill and an opening dedication for the 1927 poetry collection Now We Are Six, in addition to a drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet in the snow.

There is also a stern reprimand written by Milne on behalf of the anthropomorphic bear, in response to an Observer crossword that referred to the character as a “fabulous monster”. Milne noted to Muller that “Pooh strongly objects”, adding that the bear was threatening to come to the publishing house and make his position clear.

Traces of “creative tension” between Milne and Shepard, and mediated by Muller, are evident in the letters, with the former stating that “[Shepard] must do new drawings for April and September as the originals are very poor.”

Milne also displayed moments of impatience with his co-creator’s tardiness. In one letter to Muller he wrote: “If Shepard has not done the new drawing yet, then he need not.”

For his part, Shepard appeared to be contending with housing issues at the time and defended the delay to Milne, explaining that “I am doing my best to hurry on the drawings, but style is rather cramped by the blasted move, [which] as you will see from the above address, has been accomplished.”

“Thursday, Friday, Saturday, were, to put it mildly, bloody …”

According to Fieldings, the estimated value of various documents range from £100 to £1,500. But they could sell for even more: similar items have found buyers willing to make record-breaking purchases. For example, in 2018, an original Winnie-the-Pooh map by Shepard sold for £430,000.

Farmer noted that news of the find has generated worldwide interest from potential buyers, particularly in the UK and the US.

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While the bulk of the material relates to the honey-loving bear and his assortment of friends, the letter collection also contains correspondences from other writers, including Enid Blyton and JRR Tolkien.

In one correspondence with Muller, Blyton discusses advertising space and expresses preference for her next book to be publicised on back covers.

Elsewhere, Tolkien addresses handwritten postcards to Smith about the minutiae of typefaces and making arrangements to collect an awards trophy. Smith’s son, Simon, who now runs Cressrelles, remembers his father describing the Lord of the Rings author as someone with “incredible wit and humour, but the most atrocious man at meeting deadlines.”

Simon Smith is hoping that the sale of these letters will raise enough money to invest in an institution studying the work of Milne. The auction is expected to take place this Thursday, ahead of National Winnie-the-Pooh Day on 18 January.

Described as “the most famous bear in literary history”, stories featuring Winnie-the-Pooh have been translated into multiple languages including Faroese, Latin and Yiddish.

Inspiration for the character was sparked by a teddy bear belonging to Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, and the archive collection includes a birthday book of drawings from Milne and Shepard dedicated to him.

A few months after the death of the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks in 2015, I visited his office in midtown Manhattan to pass on my condolences to his friend and longtime editor Kate Edgar. Shelves were stacked with editions of every translation of Sacks’s books; piled on every surface were reams of yellow paper covered in Sacks’s barely legible scrawl. The subjects were as eclectic as his enthusiasms: two towering piles were marked “Dreams” and “Memory”, and another was marked “Borges”. There was more than enough material for at least two more books of essays, Edgar told me (The River of Consciousness would be published in 2017, and Everything in Its Place in 2019), and then, gesturing to some of the piles around her, intimated the scale of another task: sorting through 70 large boxes of correspondence.

From the riches of those boxes, Edgar has now distilled 700 pages of absorbing, illuminating, moving and entertaining letters for publication. They range from August 1960 (when Sacks first moved from England to North America), through to a few days before his death in New York, from melanoma, 55 years later.

Sacks qualified in medicine in England in the 1950s and, after his internship, began training as a neurologist in California in 1961. The US offered “enormous opportunities, not merely professionally, but for leading a full and fascinating life in many other ways”, he wrote home. He came from a family of medics: his father, Samuel Sacks, practised as a London GP well into his 90s, while his mother, Muriel Elsie Landau, was a distinguished gynaecologist. She looms large throughout this collection: “My mother was not only the first Jewish woman (and almost the first woman) to be elected a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,” Sacks later wrote, “[but] one of the very few Jewish consultants in the whole of England.” One letter reveals how she would occasionally bring home “deformed foetuses” from hospital and ask the 10-year-old Oliver to dissect them. He had a traumatic childhood: he was evacuated to a sadistic residential school during the war, and his letters often return to the horror of that abandonment. His memoir On the Move (2015) describes how his mother abandoned him twice over when, at 18, he admitted his homosexuality. “You are an abomination!” Sacks remembered her saying. “I wish you had never been born.”

But the loving early letters Sacks wrote to both parents are among the jewels of this collection, detailing his anxieties about medicine (citing a temporary “aversion to patients, sickness, hospitals and particularly doctors”), his weightlifting escapades (he was the joint Californian squat champion), and his accounts of motorbiking through the desert, high on amphetamines, and using a stethoscope to siphon stolen petrol.

Even in his 20s, Sacks wrote in a learned, stylish and energetic prose. But it’s after his move to New York in 1965 that the compassionate physician of later fame appears. He began with neuropathology (but confessed “poring down a microscope drives me nuts, and I need some return to clinical work”), then took on a job in a headache clinic – material from which would become his first book, Migraine (1970). Then, as a resident neurologist at Beth Abraham, a hospital for chronic neurological disease, he found his vocation, as devoted physician to patients with a severe form of Parkinson’s disease (encephalitis lethargica), all of whom had been institutionalised since the “sleepy sickness” epidemic of the 1920s. A new medication, L-dopa, was just becoming available, and in his groundbreaking Awakenings (1973) Sacks charted its spectacular effects. The book later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and a Hollywood movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. In the early 80s, a young editor called Kate Edgar was assigned to edit a book of his neurological case histories that would later become The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), the title chosen by his then editor at the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers.

A letter from Sacks to Edgar asking her to stay on working for him is among the most touching in the book: he wonders “whether we might make some sort of private arrangement between us, my retaining you as – I can think of no term general enough! – but as some sort of literary/intellectual factotum, inciting, organising, typing, editing… odd pieces, case histories, essays, lectures, etc”. It comes two-thirds of the way through Letters, when Sacks is 53; Hat (as he called it) propelled him to the bestseller lists and international fame.

Sacks wrote of Edgar as his “mother figure”, adding that he did his best work when she was in the next room. His many subsequent books – Seeing Voices, Uncle Tungsten, Musicophilia, Hallucinations, among others – are testament to a successful partnership. By the end of his life, his correspondents included his many fans around the world (in my loft at home I have a kind response he sent me in 1997), as well as poets, artists and scientists. The prose shifts gradually in tone as he was called upon to take up the role of public intellectual, but his restless curiosity, breadth of interests, and the energy of his enthusiasm never wanes, even when responding to his critics. His reply to a psychiatrist, Orrin Palmer, who in 1988 wrote to complain of Sacks’s characterisation of Tourette syndrome, reads: “I have a profound respect for Affliction, and the Afflicted – this is at the heart of my physicianhood and personhood… While I fully respect the medical model – and my own writings (Migraine etc) are examples of it – I think that one must go BEYOND it.” Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is secured.

Gavin Francis is a GP in Edinburgh. His book The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection is out now

In the week that Ireland turns ­everything green and celebrates its diaspora, a new online archive has given voice to the human cost paid by generations of emigrants.

More than 7,000 letters from emigrants to North America spanning four centuries have been collected and digitised, giving poignant insight into the homesickness, tribulations, and occasional triumphs, of those who crossed the Atlantic.

They tell of Pennsylvania coal­mines, Minnesota winters, Boston slums, and the desperate struggle to adapt and survive – and to make peace with the likelihood of never seeing home again.

Kerby Miller, a US historian, amassed the trove over nearly six decades by combing archives and private collections, and making public appeals for letters, memoirs and other documents in trunks, drawers and attics, yielding more than 150,000 pages spanning the late 1600s to the 20th century.

The University of Galway has placed the collection in a digital repository that is searchable and free to access, creating a new window on Irish, US and Canadian history in time for St Patrick’s Day.

On Sunday, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, is to present the US president, Joe Biden – who has called himself a “proud son” of Ireland – with a bowl of shamrocks at the White House, concluding a week of events in Washington and across the world that celebrate diaspora success stories.

The Galway project, called Imirce, illuminates darker parts of a mass migration that included the Great Famine of the 1840s and depopulated Ireland. “All the emigrants, whether middle class or from poor labouring backgrounds, had to adjust to a country that was in a much more advanced state of hypercapitalism,” said Miller.

“Life in America was just so much more competitive. There were a lot of people who metaphorically fell by the wayside and some who barely survived. And there were others who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.”

The letters reveal struggles and heartache, said the historian. “A common theme is the longing for home and the sadness that they probably will never be able to return home. Another is the obligation to send money back, which often they can barely afford, and also to pay for the passage of younger brothers and sisters.”

Letters sent home – a key plot device in Colm Tóibín’s diaspora novel Brooklyn, later made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan – also showed hope and pride, said Miller. “Many immigrants were happy to be in America. They felt they had more opportunity to be independent – that’s a word they often used. For instance, owning their own farm or shop, not having to take their hats off in the presence of the landlord, or obey the wishes of a priest.”

One letter from New York to Cork in the 1930s details the author’s sex life.

Miller began collecting the material when he was a young scholar in the late 1960s and never stopped. He turned a doctoral dissertation into a book, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in 1986.

The University of Missouri emeritus professor donated his collection to the University of Galway on condition it be transcribed, digitised and added to, with continued appeals for more documents.

The letters dispel any myths that the Irish found America paved with gold, said Breandán Mac Suibhne, a University of Galway historian who is part of the team leading the project. “A lot of these people had very difficult lives. If some experienced the American dream, others experienced the American nightmare.”

Some letters made coded references to relatives back home, said Mac Suibhne. “They might say this is no country for a drunkard or someone who doesn’t want to work – a way of saying don’t send over uncle Johnny.” Mac Suibhne would like to extend the project to letters from England, Wales and Scotland.

Daniel Carey, a professor of English at the University of Galway, said the correspondence ­conveyed rich, myriad impressions of a new world. “It’s a much more subtle resource when you can hear people’s voices.”

One woman, writing from Philadelphia in 1836, gave a wary endorsement of two sons of ­family friends from Derry. “They are in ­genteel employment and promise to be graceful and sober citizens.”

During an era of anti-­immigrant sentiment in the US and in Ireland, the letters were first-hand testimony of what drove people to uproot and seek new lives, said Carey. “It’s a reminder of their eagerness to work. They’re making a contribution as domestic servants and in demanding industries. It’s a record of people’s desire to get on.”

When the social historian Emily Cockayne first came across an old newspaper article about some “indescribably filthy” letters that were sent to residents of Littlehampton in the 1920s, she knew immediately that she wanted to write about it.

But she never dreamed that recounting the extraordinary real life events she had uncovered in a scholarly book about the history of neighbours would one day net her a film deal for a movie starring Olivia Colman, Timothy Spall and Jessie Buckley.

Wicked Little Letters, a comic thriller about the Littlehampton “poison pen” letters and the libel trials that ensued, will be in cinemas from Friday. It is based on what Cockayne describes as “the weird stuff that develops” in “a neighbourhood that’s gone awry” – a story that she first pieced together writing her 2012 book, Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours. “I was researching neighbours and trying to put together various ways neighbours could be in conflict,” said Cockayne, who is an associate professor in early modern history at the University of East Anglia and worked as an expert consultant on the film.

“I’d found litigation cases and police court cases where neighbours take really minor, petty issues to court like ‘my neighbour stole my clothes off the line’. And then, around 2008, as I was trawling newspapers from the 1910s and 1920s, I hit upon this case in Littlehampton.”

The more she delved into it, the more fascinated she became. “It gave me a lens into obsessive, focused, uncomfortable neighbouring,” she said. “I thought: I’ve got to work out how this neighbourhood actually works, and how this can happen there.”

Colman plays Edith Swan, a “respectable” working-class woman who, in 1919, starts accusing her rough, foul-mouthed nextdoor neighbour Rose Gooding of sending her – and other residents of the small English seaside town – “wicked little letters”. Gooding, who is played by Buckley, was then put on trial for libel. But is Swan the innocent victim she purports to be?

The letters, in which Swan is described as a “foxy ass piss country whore”, inspire some of the funniest moments of the film – but were decried by contemporary newspaper reports as too offensive to print and, in one case, too obscene for a jury to hear.

“To the old bastards,” reads one, addressed to a mutual neighbour of Gooding and Swan. “You dirty cows. You bloody fucking sods … You are bloody dirty or you would clean the yard sometimes, you bloody rotten buggers.”

Another explodes in a rant about a neighbour’s stinking drains: “You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores, go and fuck your cunt.”

“It’s the way they’re living,” said Cockayne, who expanded on her earlier research and wrote in more depth about the Littlehampton libels in her 2023 book, Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters. “Between 1919 and 1944, neighbours started to stop being so reciprocal and caring about each other’s idiosyncratic differences and became more privatised and more judgmental.”

The Littlehampton letters stand out because most missives with obscene language were written by men at the time. “The unusual part of this is that these letters were tapping into neighbouring issues to do with dirty back gardens. It’s a way of understanding neighbouring – particularly feminine neighbouring – at the time.”

The youngest of 13 children, Swan had grown up in a claustrophobic two-bedroom house. At the end of the first world war, she is a 30-year-old spinster who is still living in her childhood home, helping to look after two of her adult brothers – who Cockayne’s research suggests were “very odd” and possibly mentally unstable – and sleeping in a bedroom with her elderly parents. Swan’s father, who is played by Spall, was described by police as “an irritable and excitable old man who would not be very difficult to upset”. Cockayne thinks Swan had “no space to think” and felt trapped and frustrated by her inability to express herself: “She is stuck at home, parenting two weird brothers and increasingly elderly parents.”

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That’s when Gooding, 29, moves into the house next door with her husband, her sister and five children (four of whom were born illegitimate and were rumoured to have been fathered by different men).

The two families are then forced to live uncomfortably close to each other. “Rose’s house was basically in the back yard of the Swans’ house,” said Cockayne. “They shared a store, and previously had shared a toilet.”

Some of the letters are signed “RG”, which is partly what convinced the local police that Gooding wrote them. “They think someone like Rose Gooding would be so stupid that she would sign her initials,” said Cockayne.

Although both families were equally working class, the illegitimacy of so many of the children made the Goodings appear less respectable than the Swans. In the eyes of the police, “she looks the part and acts the part”. “To them, she’s an obvious suspect.”

Gooding’s apparent irreverence for propriety might have made living in close proximity to her both abhorrent and attractive. “I think Edith became a little bit obsessed with this family in the garden,” said Cockayne. “I don’t think she wants to be who she is any more. She looks at Rose and she thinks she’s wild and exciting.”

Her favourite scene from the film occurs right at the start, when Gooding returns a washtub her family shares with the Swans by leaving it outside their front door, dirty and full of hair. “That, for me, sums it all up – what these neighbourhoods were like and what’s behind these letters: complicated, entwined lives, shared spaces and the annoyances that can come from that. If people are forced to live their lives like that, they’re going to fall out.”

A collection of letters from one of Charles Dickens’ most valued confidantes will go on display in London for the first time this week to mark 212 years since the literary giant’s birth.

The letters were written by Dickens’ sister-in-law turned housekeeper and executor Georgina Hogarth, who was instrumental in preserving the author’s legacy after his death in 1870.

Acquired by the Charles Dickens Museum, the correspondence offers an illuminating insight into a woman who “had a huge impact both within Dickens’ life and after it”, said Emma Harper, a curator at the museum.

The extensive correspondence – a small portion of which will go on public display – was written by Hogarth to journalist Charles Kent between 1867 and 1898. It discusses Hogarth’s “unbearable” grief after Dickens’ death as well as her great admiration for the man.

“We’re hoping the letters provide some insight into Dickens’ personal life and Hogarth’s role in it,” said Harper, who is in the process of deciphering the 120-strong collection at a rate of around six letters a day. “It’s also just lovely to have Georgina’s own words because women, at this point in time, were not recorded quite so well.”

Hogarth lived with Dickens for 28 years and bore witness to some of the most significant events in his private life – namely, his separation from her sister Catherine, whom he left for 18-year-old actor Ellen Ternan in 1858.

Alongside biographer John Forster, she was an executor of Dickens’ will, and was responsible for distributing his estate. She also co-edited three volumes of letters with the author’s daughter Mamie, whom she had been involved in raising, alongside the nine other Dickens children.

“For us the key thing is to find out more about Georgina’s life and her relationship with Dickens, exploring their friendship and the role of women within the household of this very famous writer,” added Harper. “The letters will add a great deal to research about her.”

Writing to Kent on Dickens’ birthday on 7 February 1871 – the first after his death – Georgina expressed that life without her companion was “very very hard to bear” and that she wished to die. She caveated: “I know he is happy and blessed and indeed I do not think I would recall him to this dark world if I could.”

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A small selection of the letters will be on display in the study of Dickens’ former home at 48-49 Doughty Street in London. The letters had been in a private collection since 1999 and were bought at auction by the museum for £6,048 in December, using funding from a V&A Purchase Grant and Arts Council England.

The museum’s current exhibition focuses on another of Dickens’ most significant relationships – his long-running friendship with novelist Wilkie Collins.

Wojnarowicz’s first break came in the summer of 1980, when SoHo News published a centerfold of his photographic series “Rimbaud in New York.” The series was inspired by the artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s life-size wheat-pasted posters of Rimbaud in street clothes, which Wojnarowicz likely saw with Delage in Paris. In the photographs, his friends wear a mask of the poet as they pose throughout New York City, in decrepit warehouses by the piers, butcher shops, and subway cars, sometimes injecting drugs or masturbating.

“Dear Jean Pierre” makes the full context of the images clear, giving the series new depth. The photographs testify to Wojnarowicz’s intense cathexis of Rimbaud, and his lifelong methodology of the self as other—a notion cribbed from the French poet’s classic teen line “Je est un autre.” But reading the letters alongside these images shows that they’re about more than Wojnarowicz’s desire to be notorious and disguised. They also commemorate his yearning for his absent lover, who appeared behind the mask in a few Rimbaud photos taken during a brief visit to New York.

Those reunions were infrequent, and, by 1981, the strain on their relationship had begun to show. Wojnarowicz’s art and his life both changed dramatically that year. He met his friend and mentor Peter Hujar, a downtown photographer once affiliated with Warhol’s Factory. Hujar and Wojnarowicz began a largely chaste love affair that would last until Hujar’s death from AIDS in 1987. True to form, Wojnarowicz masks, or at least downplays, this momentous meeting in his letters to Delage. On January 5, 1981, he reported: “Spent the night talking with a new friend about life / photos etc.—rare that I have chance to just talk and listen to interesting things.” Hujar also takes portraits of Wojnarowicz that open his subject up. Wojnarowicz wrote to Delage in August, 1981, “I looked at the photos he made and was surprised: they are very beautiful—I never saw myself like this before.”

As Wojnarowicz got closer to Hujar and deeper into his art, the tone of the conversation with Jean-Pierre began to sound more mournful, and doubt crept in. In January, 1982, he wrote, “Please be patient with me.” There are no letters from March 18th to June, 1982, included in the volume. According to Carr’s biography, Delage slept with one of Wojnarowicz’s friends in Paris around this time. “Dear Jean Pierre” contains Wojnarowicz’s hurt reaction in one of the last letters in the collection: “I can not think about living with you at this time. I need to solve my problems with my work and my life.” The problems with work, at least, were good ones to have: on June 11, 1982, Wojnarowicz appeared in a group show at the Alexander Milliken Gallery on Prince Street with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Hockney, and other art stars, which led to his first solo show in December of that year.

This pre-AIDS arcadia didn’t last. Four months after that solo show, and right around the time that “Dear Jean Pierre” closes, Larry Kramer published “1,112 and Counting,” the first clarion warning: “Why isn’t every gay man in this city so scared shitless that he is screaming for action? Does every gay man in New York want to die?” The lone, oblique reference to the epidemic in the correspondence appears in a coda to “Dear Jean Pierre” from September, 1991, nine months before Wojnarowicz’s death. By that time, he had been largely consumed by the political and medical emergency of AIDS. He sent Jean-Pierre a card, a dispatch from a different world, referring to “a lot of different illnesses.” He wrote, “I don’t have much energy. I take a walk every day if I can. It’s difficult inside my head—I wish I could get a reprieve from these sensations and isolation.”

Wojnarowicz found reprieve in art and activism, but a comment he made to Zoe Leonard in 1989 suggests the trajectory that he could have taken in a better world. As Carr recounts in “Fire in the Belly,” Leonard asked Wojnarowicz to look at her aerial photographs, dreamy black-and-white images of feathery clouds. She was worried that the work was at odds with her activism around the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz told her not to worry: “We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty.” Of course, there’s beauty in Wojnarowicz’s political art, a quality deepened by seeing the artist in love in “Dear Jean Pierre.” The book is yet another monument to the incalculable lost potential of the AIDS epidemic. But it’s also a joyful reclamation of an epoch of discovery in Wojnarowicz’s art—and in the lives of its subjects, who, it is clear, were deeply affected by their time together. Speaking to a reporter about the P.P.O.W. exhibition, Delage said of his Wojnarowicz archive, “I keep it like sacred things.”