| Description | Letters concerning Cornish mines, engines and business, from 1775 to 1799, arranged alphabetically. The letters appear to have been culled from various sources – letters sent to Soho which may have been removed from the General Correspondence series, letters received by Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Matthew Robinson Boulton and Thomas Wilson in Cornwall and London, etc. It is not clear when the bundle was arranged like this, but the core of it is almost certainly the bundle that the List of Contents of the Watt Room described as “Cornish Letters 1776 to 1785, containing no documents relative to contested engines.”
The correspondents include influential mine adventurers such as John Edwards of the Hayle Copper House, members of the Fox family, John Bevan and William Harris. There are also letters from Cornish engineers such as John Budge and Jonathan Hornblower Senior, and two memoranda relating to engines put up by Richard Trevithick (the younger) in the 1790s. The bundle also contains several letters from the engineer Thomas Dudley who was employed by Boulton & Watt to put up some of their earliest Cornish engines. |