This exhibition explores correspondence from the medieval period to the present and celebrates the letter’s enduring importance. It examines letters’ capacity to chronicle all stages and aspects of human life – from birth to death – and to capture both the personal and the professional.

It reveals how they are powerful in their abilities to connect with and impact on the lives of others. It illuminates how letters are also deeply vulnerable, fragile objects whose preservation is liable to the vicissitudes of time, fashion, and chance.

Image: ‘The Letter’, from Mrs [Elizabeth] Turner,
The cowslip, or, More cautionary stories in verse; with thirty engravings by Samuel Williams (1885). Briggs Collection, PZ6.7.T8

This exhibition has been jointly curated by University of Nottingham Libraries, Manuscripts and Special Collections, and Professor Lynda Pratt, School of English, University of Nottingham.