There have been a lot of discoveries in the archives recently. Poirot is set to emerge in two short-stories uncovered among Agatha Christie's papers, and my colleague, Jamie Andrews, has been busy with the recovered John Osborne plays from the Lord Chamberlain's Collection. We are all now very familiar with some records previously held in Westminster, and it looks like there is more than literary implications to follow.
The political implications of archival discoveries has a long history, of course. The ferment of the Civil Wars was impart stoked by the claims of antiquaries to have found constitutional precedents, and the history of Magna Carta is one of continual recovery and interpretation, not least during the agitation for political reform in the 1790s and 1810s. We displayed The Black Dwarf, an early nineteenth-century radical publication that was very much part of the reform movement, but didn't show The Black Book (1819), but it's been 'digitalized' on Google Books. Perhaps 50,000 copies of this title were sold at the time, against the backdrop of the Peterloo Massacre, the US-originating financial crisis and the repressive Six Acts. Would Poirot make any connections, I wonder?
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