Arquivo HOUG - Papers of Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton

160 boxes

Shortly after Houghton's death, his correspondence and other papers were entrusted to Arthur Edwin Scanes, who 'classified and catalogued' them; this work is praised by T. Wemyss Reid in the preface to his Life, Letters, and Friendships of... Lord Houghton, and it is likely that the labelled paper files which can be found throughout the collection are his work. Notes by Scanes on documents such as 'found with 1874 letters' (HOUG/227/65) suggests that Houghton kept at least some of his correspondence filed chronologically, and that it was Scanes who arranged them by correspondent.

A list by Scanes: 'Correspondence of the late Lord Houghton | List of Boxes and their Contents', describing three boxes worth of material, can be found at HOUG/HC; not all the papers described there can be matched with items now in the collection, and reference is made to family letters 'already handed over to the present Lord Houghton'.

When James Pope Hennessy was given access to Houghton's papers in the 1940s to write his two-volume life, he describes them as being 'housed in twelve japanned-tin deed boxes' (preface to Vol. 1., 1949); in the preface to his second volume (1951), he mentions 'a mahogany chest, apparently unopened since the period of the Franco-Prussian war, and continuing upwards of four thousand letters which Wemyss Reid could not have seen'.

A first accession was given to Trinity College by Lady Crewe, wife of Houghton's son, in 1959; a second was given by her daughter the Duchess of Roxburghe in 1974.

Houghton's archive includes: Cambridge papers, 1827-1830; a voluminous correspondence; literary papers; publications, 1834-1873; political papers, 1837-1880s; business and estate papers; papers relating to travels, 1828-1885, papers relating to clubs and societies; commonplace books, 1838-1865; press cuttings, 1801-1878; diaries of Annabella Hungerford Milnes, Lady Houghton, 1855-1872; papers of Houghton’ father Robert Pemberton Milnes and other members of his family.

The two accessions are arranged very differently. The first, containing the majority of the correspondence, is essentially a box-by-box item list. The second accession is arranged hierarchically and contains more subject-related material.

This material is open for research unless otherwise stated.

A printed finding aid for the first accession and an incomplete one for the second accession are available at Trinity College Library. There are also index cards for the whole collection.

Milnes-Coates archive at the Borthwick Institute, University of York.

Papers of the Milnes family of Fryston Hall, Crewe-Milnes family, Barons Houghton at Sheffield Archives.

Papers of the Monckton-Arundell Family, Viscounts Galway of Serlby Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1680-1958, at the University of Nottingham.

Papers of Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes (1858-1945), 1st Marquess of Crewe, at Cambridge University Library.

Crewe Manuscripts: collected by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, bequeathed to Trinity College, Cambridge by his granddaughter the Duchess of Roxburghe in 2014.

T. Wemyss Reid, The life, letters, and friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton (London : Cassell, 1890, 2. vols.)
James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: the years of promise, 1809-1851, (London: Constable, 1949)
James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: the flight of youth, 1851-1885, (London: Constable, 1951)

May 2023: This on-line catalogue is a work in progress, as information continues to be transferred from the printed finding aids and index cards, and descriptions are expanded. It is hoped that further information about the original arrangement of the material will emerge as work continues.