Everything Curious': Samuel Hieronymus Grimm and Sir Richard Kaye

Abstract

The British Library's Manuscript Collections contain a wealth of British topographical drawings which reflect the collecting instincts of antiquarians with a passion for recording, in word and image, the urban and rural landscapes around them. One such collector was the ecclesiastic and baronet Sir Richard Kaye, who recorded his thoughts in notebooks and correspondence. Over a twenty-year period, Kaye employed the artist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm as a travel companion, to record 'everything curious' that they discovered on their journeys across the country. The notebooks and drawings survive in the Library's collections. For today's local historian, these parallel sources provide a rare opportunity to recover the lost and pre-industrial landscapes of late eighteenth-century England. In particular they open a window into the everyday lives of the inhabitants of Kirkby-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, where Kaye was rector and where Grimm visited on more than one occasion.