In an exciting development which holds very significant potential for future study of the work of Ted Hughes, the University of Huddersfield recently announced that it has acquired the substantial Hughes collection of the late poet, scholar and member of the Ted Hughes Society, Mark Hinchcliffe.
Ceramic jaguar sculpture made by Ted Hughes, included in the Mark Hinchcliffe Collection at the University of Huddersfield
The collection will be freely available to the public for research at the University’s Heritage Quay Archive, and includes some truly outstanding items. As Steve Ely, director of the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield explained:
We’re delighted to have acquired Mark Hinchliffe’s outstanding collection. It comprises over one hundred and seventy items, including signed first editions of dozens of Hughes’s trade, limited-edition and fine-press publications; original letters written by Hughes and his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath; signed and annotated books from Hughes’s personal collection; and, some absolutely unique items: a very fine ceramic jaguar sculpted by Hughes in 1967, the only intact example anywhere in the world of Hughes’s work in the plastic arts; an album containing hundreds of photographs, including some previously unknown photographs of both Hughes and Plath; a holograph manuscript of the radio play ‘Orpheus & Eurydice’ with some significant differences to the broadcast and published versions, and, a bespoke edition of the Gehenna Press’s limited edition Howls & Whispers, comprising the original fine-book, 8 original watercolours by Leonard Baskin and a unique copper-plate, engraved portrait of Sylvia Plath
A long-time member and former chair of the Elmet Trust, Mark Hinchcliffe is much-missed in the community of Ted Hughes scholarship, and it is a fitting tribute to his years of devoted study that his collection will now afford future generations of scholars a unique and exciting entry into such crucial aspects of Hughes’s life and work.