The Hockliffe Project: Homepage

The Hockliffe Project has been designed to promote the study of early British children's literature. It will provide internet access to the full texts of the Hockliffe Collection of Early Children's Books, owned by De Montfort University, and will accompany this archive with contextualising documents and research. The aim is to work towards a reevaluation of children's literature in its own infancy, and to let these rich and varied books speak for themselves.

How to Use the Hockliffe Project Website

Access the catalogue using the link in the drop-down box at the left of the tool-bar above
Alternatively use the search facility in the middle of the tool-bar
From either the catalogue or the search results click on the blue catalogue numbers at the left of each entry to access a full record of any book
Then follow the link to view the pages of an individual book

The main point of access to the digitised images of the books in the Hockliffe Collection is through the catalogue. You can view the catalogue by following the link in the drop-down box at the left of the tool-bar above. Once the catalogue has down-loaded, it can be sorted in various ways - by author, title, date and so on - by using the drop-down box at the top of the catalogue page.

Clicking on the blue catalogue numbers at the left of each entry in the catalogue will take you to a fuller bibliographical record of the book. If the check-box next to the catalogue contains a tick, full page images of the whole book are currently available. You will be able to see these by following a link from the full bibliographical record page.

Throughout the website, books in the Hockliffe Collection are specified by their four-digit catalogue number. It should be noted that the electronic catalogue is not yet complete, but does detail most of the Collection. So far, only some of the books in the Collection have been digitised.

Alternatively, you can access texts from the Collection by using the search facility, also located in the tool-bar. You can search for books by author, title-word, date, and so on. A 'free text' search allows you to find all occurences of a particular word or phrase anywhere in the full records for every book. This is most useful as a key-word search which will look for any occurences of the text you type in both the bibliographic records of the book and the essays which accompany many of the texts. For any search, you should use correct captialisation, and you may use '*' as a wild-card to complete a word or phrase.

To view a general essay introducing eighteenth and nineteenth-century children's literature, or the Hockliffe Project's contacts and links pages, please follow the link in the drop-down box on the left of the tool-bar.

Brief Introduction to the Hockliffe Project

The Hockliffe Collection is a unique cache of over a thousand early British children's books. They were originally collected by Frederick Hockliffe (1833-1914), a Bedford publisher and bookseller. In 1927 his eldest son, Frederic Rich Hockliffe (1861-1929), bookseller and mayor of Bedford, donated the collection to Bedford Training College. This later became Bedford College of Higher Education and has since become part of De Montfort University.

The books in the Hockliffe Collection range in date from 1685 to the mid-twentieth century, although the majority of works were printed between 1760 and 1840. The collection is not comprehensive, but it is representative of the wide range of writing for children in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are fables, nursery tales and stories, and there are books of instruction and religious works. There are periodicals and books of poetry, alphabets, spelling books and battledores. There are chapbooks and ballads, and mathematical, geographical, historical and scientific books. And there are toy-books, game-books, and books with moveable parts. All of these books vary enormously in size and shape as well as in the quality of paper and printing. There is a wide variety of binding, often original. Most of the books contain illustrations of diverse kinds, often hand-coloured. But above all, perhaps, the Hockliffe Collection is interesting because it has been used. Many of the books are marked in some way, with indications of ownership or comments scrawled in margins. There is wear on some of the books which testifies to heavy use. Equally interesting is that some books appear to have been either little used or treated with great care.

Placing the Hockliffe Collection on the internet will enable many more people to gain access to these rare and delicate texts. Scholars and students interested in later eighteenth and early nineteenth century culture and society will be able to read and also print out these books. All of the texts have now been microfilmed and they are in the process of being digitised. They will become available on the World Wide Web during 2001-2002. Explanatory material is being made available alongside the texts.

The Hockliffe Project is based in the Faculty of Humanities of De Montfort University. It has received generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The project staff are keen to hear ideas and opinions. Questions, comments and suggestions are welcome, and should be addressed to Dr. Matthew Grenby, Hockliffe Research Fellow.

This page is maintained by Matthew Grenby and was last updated on 20 August 2001. Any questions about the page should be addressed to him at m.o.grenby@ncl.ac.uk.