The Text

Summary

The manuscripts of the letters

The letters to John Potter are in the National Library of Wales (12432E); they have never been published either wholly or in part. The letters to Cox, Mary and Edward Macro form part of the second volume of Macro correspondence in the British Library (Add. MSS 32557) and are also unpublished. Three letters to Edward Macro survive only as copies in the Norfolk County Record Office, and one letter is included in the Macro Letter-book. The majority of the letters to Sir Edward Littleton are preserved at the Staffordshire County Record Office (D1413/1); six other letters are in the Folger Shakespeare Library (w.a.57). Of the latter, three were transcribed or partly transcribed by Francis Kilvert and printed in his Memoirs of Richard Hurd.

The letters to William Mason are preserved at Hartlebury Castle, including those fragments transcribed by Hurd's nephew onto separate sheets of paper and inserted into volumes in the library. The complete letters have been published in Pearce and Whibley's edition of 1932 (The Correspondence of Richard Hurd & William Mason), and the fragments by James Nankivell in the Modern Language Review ('Extracts from the Destroyed Letters of Richard Hurd to William Mason’). For this edition the originals have been re-transcribed and more extensively annotated. Hurd's letters to Balguy had been consulted by Francis Kilvert for his Memoirs and were then apparently lost. They were re-discovered in the early 1980s and now form part of the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Permission was given to consult the photostat copies retained by the British Library. The majority of these letters were printed by Kilvert, but with many un-noted excisions and without annotation. The full text is presented here for the first time. The correspondence with Warburton was edited by Hurd and first published in 1808. The originals of the few letters of his own that were included have since disappeared. The text therefore comes from the (unannotated) published edition of 1808.

Many of the miscellaneous letters to minor correspondents have been preserved either in the original or as copies at Hartlebury Castle. These include the letters to Thomas Gray, John Green, Frederick Hervey, Thomas Warton and Charles Yorke.