The Royal Holloway, University of London Archives and the Centre for Victorian Studies (based in the English department) are working together to make letters about the history of Bedford College accessible to the public.

The Royal Holloway, University of London, Archives holds around 500 letters to Elizabeth Jesser Reid, the founder of Bedford College. The letters illuminate the early years of the College, Reid’s work as a women’s rights activist and a campaigner against slavery, and the global intellectual, philanthropic and political networks in which she was involved. Some letters detail the challenges of setting up the College – from recruiting lecturers to renovating rooms - while others debate if men and women should be educated in the same way, and consider how industrialization might affect working-class women. The collection also contains letters from Victorian luminaries like the writers Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the actress Fanny Kemble.

Thanks to funding from Royal Holloway’s Humanities and Arts Research Institute, the Archives and the Centre for Victorian Studies have digitised the letters and created an online archive. Anyone with an internet connection can access this important resource for Victorian and women’s history. This website will continue to grow over the next year.

The next step is to transcribe the letters to make them easier to read, search and analyse. In October, the Archives and the Centre for Victorian Studies hosted a workshop to train volunteer transcribers. Fifteen volunteers listened to talks about the history of the College and the letter collection from Annabel Valentine, Royal Holloway’s Archivist, and Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature. The volunteers then learnt some tricks for reading Victorian handwriting, before transcribing some letters. Their work is now published on the online archive.

However, the project is still interested in recruiting further volunteer transcribers! All that you need are basic computer skills (web browsing, word processing) and an internet connection, and the work can be done from anywhere.

If you would like to volunteer, please contact: archives@rhul.ac.uk.