Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

A unpublished note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor and an unseen letter by Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing also feature in the cache of documents, which once formed applications to the Royal Literary Fund (RLF), a charity that awards hardship grants to writers.

Letters from James Joyce, CS Lewis, Joseph Conrad, Mervyn Peake and Edith Nesbit are among those found in the case files, which are stored between the British Library, where they are available to view, and at the RLF offices tucked behind Fleet Street, where discoveries are ongoing as boxes of case files continue to be catalogued.

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here. A note from Plath’s doctor about her entering hospital for an appendectomy is among Ted Hughes’s application documents. Elsewhere, Joyce, in his 1915 application, writes that he receives “nothing in the way of royalties”, the sales of his books being “below the required number”. And Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

Lessing, who is the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize in literature, describes in a 1955 letter having moved to Britain in 1949 from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with £20, after the end of her marriage. When her debut novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published the following year, she left her job as a secretary and devoted her time to writing. “I have been living on my pen ever since, though very precariously,” she writes five years later, laying out details of debts she owed to friends, and the lack of help on offer from her family and ex-husband.

“It has been suggested that I should write scripts for murder stories for the commercial TV, but my short and unfruitful experience with this sort of work has made it clear that while I might earn a lot of money, I won’t be doing any serious work,” she writes.

The conflict between making art and earning a living through commercial work also makes itself clear in a letter by Ezra Pound in support of Joyce’s application. “He has lived for 10 years in obscurity and poverty, that he might perfect his writing and be uninfluenced by commercial demands.”

At the time of the application in July 1915, Joyce had fled Trieste, where he had first moved in 1904. He had published the poetry collection Chamber Music and short story collection Dubliners, and was working on Ulysses. In his letter, Pound describes the latter as “uneven”, but calls the forthcoming A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as having “indubitable value, and permanence” – an endorsement that helped win Joyce a grant. “If we ever get into cataloguing the books that might not exist without the RLF, I think we start with Ulysses and work down from there,” says Edward Kemp, the former director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, who now runs the charity.

DH Lawrence, Bram Stoker and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were also RLF recipients. Welsh poet Thomas was supported by the charity from 1938 to his death in 1953. “I have been trying to live by my writing for five years, and have lived in poverty nearly all that time,” he wrote in his August 1938 application. “So far I have had to be content with poverty, and have always been fortunate to have just enough food and to have a room to work and sleep in. But now my wife is going to have a baby, and our position is desparate [sic]”.

Given that the RLF was not due to meet until mid-October that year, the charity forwarded his application to the Royal Bounty Fund (a somewhat shadowy taxpayer-funded operation that was wound down after more than 200 years in the early 2000s). But Whitehall didn’t mince words when rejecting the application:“If one is to put it brutally, ought Thomas – at 23 and apparently unable to support himself – to have married and be adding to his family? If he has taken on these responsibilities, ought he confine his activities to writing comparatively unremunerative verse, etc at a time when even the most successful find it difficult to make a living by literature?”

***

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

Ali Smith, Monique Roffey and Anna Burns are among the prominent contemporary writers whom the fund has supported, as well as Hanif Kureishi, after he suffered an accident that left him paralysed.

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake first applied to the RLF in 1948 when he was struggling to complete the second novel in his fantasy series. By the 1960s, his health had declined, and his wife, Maeve Gilmore, applied for a second grant on his behalf. “He has been ill since 1956, with what was first diagnosed as a breakdown, but has subsequently [been] found to be encephalitis, with Parkinson’s disease as a consequence,” she writes in an October 1961 letter. (A posthumous study found that he in fact probably died of Lewy body dementia). “He has managed to do a little drawing, but work of a literary nature is no longer possible.”

The RLF saw a 400% increase in applications for hardship grants between 2023 and 2024. To be eligible, a writer has to have had two works professionally published. Grants are awarded for basic living expenses, costs associated with long-term disabilities or health conditions, and one-off costs like unexpected bills. Most of the RLF’s money comes from authors who bequeathed some or all of their literary estates to the charity, including Colin MacInnes, Somerset Maugham, AA Milne, Arthur Ransome and Ronald Blythe.

The archives unveil a complex web of literary connections: there is CS Lewis supporting Peake’s application, Henry James backing Joseph Conrad. “You look back, and people who you’d have thought are surviving as writers really aren’t,” says Kemp.

“You’d hope we didn’t have to exist,” he adds. But the organisation’s former tagline says it all: “Sometimes bad things happen to good writers.”

• Archival quotations featured by permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd on behalf of The Estate of Doris Lessing; The Estate of James Joyce; The Estates of Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore; and New Directions Publishing Corp on behalf of Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S Pound, © 2025. All rights and credit of archival quotations go to the owners.

• For more information about the RLF’s hardship grants and legacy-giving visit rlf.org.uk