Bronte, Blake, Wilde – read their hand-written manuscripts online

This week the extraordinary British Literary Manuscripts Online (BLMO) launches, featuring more than 400,000 pages of poems, plays, novels, private correspondence, diaries, drawings and handwritten notes by Britain's literary giants
  
  


British Library archive: The Four Zoas by William Blake
A draft of The Four Zoas by William Blake, complete with mythological characters. It went on to be published in 1893 by WB Yeats and Edwin Ellis long after Blake's death, based on incomplete manuscripts Photograph: British Library
British Library archive: William Blake's The Four Zoas
Another stunningly illustrated manuscript from Blake's The Four Zoas. The BLMO also contains extracts from his Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence collections Photograph: British Library
British Library archive: gvhjvhj
A much edited Alexander Pope version of Vol III (ff.239) of The Odyssey by Homer Photograph: British Library
Charles Dickens
Complete drafts of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist are now online Photograph: AP
British Library archive: A letter from Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
A letter from Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey in September 1850. The hundreds of correspondences between the two provided much of the material for Elizabeth Gaskell's biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë Photograph: Brontë Society
British Library archive: Charlotte Bronte manuscript of Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington
A Charlotte Brontë manuscript of Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington. A copy of Emily Brontë's Gondal Poems, with notes by Charlotte, also appears in the online archive Photograph: Brontë Society
British Library archive: A Prayer by Robert Burns
A Prayer by Robert Burns, one of the many poems and letters by the poet that are now online Photograph: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland
British Library archive: A letter from Oscar Wilde in Reading jail to More Adey
One of Oscar Wilde' letters to his close friend More Adey in 1896. This was written during Wilde's spell in Reading jail Photograph: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
British Library archive: Quote from Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies
An extract from Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies dating from the 1880s, featuring: "Being natural is simply a pose, and one of the most irritating poses I know," later uttered by Lord Henry in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray Photograph: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
British Library archive: Quote from Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young
One of Oscar Wilde's most repeated quotes – "There is only one thing worse than being talked about. That is not being talked about" – gets knocked into shape in this draft of Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young Photograph: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
British Library archive: Dr. Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds
Dr Samuel Johnson, depicted here by Joshua Reynolds, is another author whose manuscripts appear in the archive. Later this year further documents will go online spanning medieval to renaissance writers, such as Bede, Geoffrey Chaucer, Philip Sidney and Thomas Wyatt Photograph: National Portrait Gallery
 

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