The History of Sherborne House - Part 4
Bibliography
The two principle archival sources are those held by Sherborne Castle Estates and the Dorset History Centre. The 1726 Inventory is held in the Public Record Office at Kew.
The Inventory of Henry Portman’s House at Sherborne . . .’a copy of an Inventory of the Goods in the Honourable Henry Portman’s house at Sherborne when Mrs Nowne Resign’d it to Eliz Sergent Imes, 1726.’ PRO C107 126 (with full transcript); a room-by-room description of the House then newly completed, wall colourings, hangings and furnishings. One which presents a unique record of this prestige, state-of-the-art construction
Katherine Barker, ‘Sherborne House and its Garden – its setting in the Borough of Newland chartered in 1227/1228’, Dorset Gardens Trust Summer 2001.
Katherine Barker, ‘William Charles Macready, The Sherborne Literary Institution and Charles Dickens’ Sherborne House Occasional Paper No 1, January 2003. A ‘bringing together’ of entries in the Sherborne Literary Institution Minutes 1852-6 and 1856-1887, and articles written up in the Sherborne Mercury, accessed in the Dorset History Centre.
Katherine Barker, Sherborne Camera (Dovecote Press 1991); early photographs of Newland including that of Macready and his family outside Sherborne House sometime between 1851 an 1860.
The Macready/Dickens Screen has been professional conserved by Rebecca Donnan. At present in the care of the Sherborne Museum collection it has recently been on display in Edinburgh in their collage exhibition. The V & A also express interest here. Presenting what might perhaps be described as a standing montage, a ‘scrap book,’ Catherine Walters and her team at Kent University have identified the many publications from which these pictures were cut; see the Kent University website.
Michael and Polly Legg, ‘Internal Fittings and Decoration of Sherborne House’ April 2004.
Shelagh Hill, Sherborne House and its People, The Friends of Sherborne House, 1995, 2nd edn 2005, illustrated by Anne Moorse.
Martin Valatin, Papers and Correspondence relating to the medieval west wing; 2008.
Rachel Hassell, ‘Charles’ Dickens’s Reading from A Christmas Carol at Sherborne in 1854, Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, Vol XXXVIII, Sept 2018, Part 388; pp 332-337.
A CD/cassette recording of an informal interview by Christine Stones in 2002 with Molly Robertson, the last-surviving resident of Sherborne House as a private house.
The Visit by John Betjeman in 1961; a CD of the BBC TV broadcast.
H C Thompson, Lord Digby’s School, Sherborne, The Abbey Press, 1969.
The Lord Digby’s Old Girls Association has a collection of School Magazines and Newsletters , I have in my collection the ‘Lord Digby’s School Magazine, no 2, October 1918, which makes for some interesting reading. The archive also includes old photographs.
The finds made during the clearing of the former School tennis courts in 2004 were mounted as a display in the House, one prompted by the ‘Tate Thames Dig’ undertaken along the London Thames foreshore in 2000 and mounted by Marc Dion in the Tate Gallery in 2002. The boxes remain stored here in the shed at Westbury.