| Description | According to his own Inventory, when Cheshire left Soho on 15 Feb. 1812 he placed the contents of this file in his Box No. 5 under the title “Letters & Copies, 1798 a 1801.” Under M. R. Boulton’s later arrangement they were put into Box D. III.
While the Matthew Boulton Papers were in the custody of the Assay Office, most of the contents of this file were scattered (see the list of Old References), and thus the original arrangement has been obscured; indeed, it is not clear whether the correspondence for these years formed a single file, or whether, perhaps, the title above covered several separate files, one for each year. Following the pattern of the later files, the documents are now arranged as four files, as follows:
6/127. 1–4. Letters and Copies, 1798.
6/128. 1-40. Letters and Copies, 1799.
6/129. 1-27. Letters and Copies, 1800.
6/130. 1-24. Letters and Copies, 1801.
Within these files, the documents have now been grouped alphabetically by the first letter of the correspondent’s name, and are arranged in chronological order within these groups.
The copy letters are all press-copies, except where otherwise stated. |