Buried treasure: rediscovering the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays

The project began upon the long-overdue cataloguing of the Lord Chamberlain's collection from 1852 onwards. The pilot covered the decade to 1863. The collection for that period numbers about 3000 plays, including for example the British versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and many farces and pantomimes with political implications around issues such as first-wave feminism. Cultured mid-Victorians agreed with G. H. Lewes that 'drama is extinct as literature' and ignored the new performance culture; these plays have therefore never been considered in either literary or social histories. The project aimed to make them more available for study, and to that end included key-wording of texts for catalogue searching, an innovation in the British Library Manuscript Catalogue.
A spin-off project has been the transcription of interesting unpublished texts and their publication on the Royal Holloway website, which is ongoing.