Blog

1. 

   Dr Dee: From Mortlake to Manchester

   On 8 September 1597, the famed Renaissance polymath John Dee wrote to his friend, Sir Edward Dyer, to complain about his current residence. ‘Tymes of very great dearth here… I...

   13th November 2025 • Read more

2. 

   The Bards of Cottonopolis: Poetry and the Labouring Class

   Grey and bustling, Manchester emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the first industrial city, churning out cotton through its steam mills and the toil of the labouring class...

   22nd September 2025 • Read more

3. 

   The Manchester woman: Mrs Isabella Linnæus Banks

   One member of the Sun Inn Group of poets who met at Poets’ Corner, who is now among the most famous but was little-known at the time, was Mrs Isabella...

   20th August 2025 • Read more

4. 

   ‘The Peaceful, the Pure, the Victorious Pen!’: The Sun Inn Group

   During the nineteenth century, Manchester was one of the most written-about cities globally; it was famously the subject of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written following the Peterloo Massacre...

   11th July 2025 • Read more

5. 

   Poets’ Corner: Industry and Identity

   ‘Near to the gates of Chetham College, in Long Millgate, stands one of those ancient and picturesque houses, which occasionally start to view like spectres of a bygone age, but...

   6th June 2025 • Read more

6. 

   Cataloguing the Cass Collection

   Maisie, our placement student, recently completed a project to finish cataloguing of the Cass Collection, which originally arrived at the Library in 2016: Between January and April, I spent 20...

   12th May 2025 • Read more

7. 

   For the private amusement of Chetham’s Library

   Early last year, we celebrated the appointment of Julianne Simpson, as Chetham’s new Librarian, with an exhibition entitled ‘Chetham’s Librarians: Lives and Legacies’. As part of the research for this...

   16th April 2025 • Read more

8. 

   Contingency planning and The wartime library

   On Friday 4 November 1938, the Library Committee of Chetham’s Library assembled – perhaps in the Reading Room – as Chetham’s Librarian prepared to address them. The weather in Manchester...

   13th March 2025 • Read more

9. 

   The Mysteries of the Manchester Alphabet

   Browsing through some of the library’s blogs recently, I came across one from May 2016 which featured a new acquisition of an old book – Roger Oldham’s Manchester Alphabet, published...

   12th December 2024 • Read more

10. 

    No Cure for Love: Two Early Modern Apothecaries and Their Books

    Chetham’s Library has no lack of books with famous former owners: there is a copy of Plato’s works owned by the early modern playwright Ben Jonson (see our post on this...

    26th November 2024 • Read more