CORRESPONDENCE AND PAPERS OF EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797)

As a result of the work of successive editors nothing of the original arrangement remained when the boxes of papers were received by Sheffield Archives. The letters had been weeded out from the rest of the material and tied up in miscellaneous bundles. An effort had been made towards classifying the very miscellaneous notes, but many of them were in hopeless confusion

In these circumstances it seemed best to adopt a chronological arrangement for the letters. The notes, however, have been roughly grouped into subjects, and given more specific headings where it seemed possible, because so many of them are undated

The papers of Edmund Burke form part of the archive of family and estate papers from Wentworth Woodhouse, deposited with Sheffield City Libraries in 1949. They were included with the personal and political papers accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by H M Government in 2001 and allocated to Sheffield City Council

Accession nos 66701-66815; 1976/15

Burke's letters and papers, entrusted by him to Dr French Laurence and Dr Walker King, and left by Mrs Burke to Earl Fitzwilliam, Dr King and the Hon William Elliott, eventually all came into the custody of the Earl, as sole survivor of the three trustees. The bulk of them found a home at Wentworth Woodhouse, while a smaller number were kept at Milton, Northamptonshire, the Earl's other family seat

In 1949 the 9th Earl Fitzwilliam deposited his family archives from Wentworth Woodhouse in the Sheffield Central Library. Among these were the letters and papers of Edmund Burke, which had come into the 2nd Earl's possession as the sole survivor of Burke's literary trustees. His son, the 3rd Earl, together with Sir Richard Bourke, edited a small proportion of these letters which they published as four volumes of Correspondence in 1844, and it is thought that it was about this time that one box of Burke's papers became separated from those at Wentworth Woodhouse and came to the Earl's other seat at Milton in Northamptonshire. The contents of this box were deposited by Captain Thomas Wentworth Fitzwilliam (now the 10th Earl Fitzwilliam) in the Northamptonshire Record Office in 1946

With these deposits, the two major existing collections of Burke's letters were made publicly available to scholars for the first time. A new ten-volume edition of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, containing all known letters from Burke and some of those was begun under the general editorship of Professor T.W. Copeland, published by Cambridge University Press, 1958-1970, 1978

Professor Copeland and his colleagues worked on this edition mainly in Sheffield for over twenty years. Many of the letters were undated and as a result of their scholarship, the chronological arrangement into which the letters had been placed on their arrival here (WWM/Bk P/1) was considerably revised; also many of the originally undated letters from a separate bundle (WWM/Bk P/2) were dated and put into their correct place in the main Bk P 1 series. In addition, the letters at the Northamptonshire Record Office were photocopied and the copies inserted in the bundles here to form a full chronological sequence of all the Burke correspondence owned by the Fitzwilliam family, some 4,000 documents in all (apart from a small number which remain in the Earl's private possession at Milton)

The Sheffield Library's Archives Division staff postponed listing these letters until the new edition of the Correspondence was complete. It was then found that the painstaking work of the 'Burke Factory' had infinitely simplified this task. The whole correspondence has now been chronologically listed, entirely re-numbered and bound into 65 volumes (WWM/Bk P/1)

Some 50 letters still have not been assigned a date. These are bound in a volume numbered WWM/Bk P/2 and are listed alphabetically by correspondent

WWM/Bk P/3/2 and 4/1 contain a series of letters which apparently were not written to Burke. Many may well have been enclosures which became separated from the main bulk of the correspondence. These are listed chronologically

The Papers of Edmund Burke, 1729-1797, from Sheffield Archives, Sheffield Libraries and Information Services and Northamptonshire Record Office