Anna took part in a one-week curatorial research micro-internship in April 2025, hosted by the University of Oxford National Trust Partnership team and co-supervised by the National Trust.
"In April 2015, a devastating fire left Clandon Park a near empty shell. Its grand interiors, designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni in the early eighteenth century to include a two-storey Marble Hall, were all but destroyed. This National Trust collection in Surrey also included also included paintings, furniture, ceramics, archives and thousands of other historical treasures, whose loss was an equally disastrous one. The “Family Verses”, which I was asked to research on this internship, was one of only fourteen books rescued from the fire. It is a substantial volume of over one hundred letters, poems, songs and notes, written by the eccentric Thomas Onslow, 2nd Earl of Onslow (1754-1827) during his time as heir to the estates of Clandon Park in the 1780s and 90s.
The curators at Clandon Park knew of the rich potential of the Verses to elucidate life at Clandon Park in the late eighteenth century. It contains off-the-cuff remarks about friends and family, hazy references to places and events. There are eulogies to dead pets, gossip on who is getting married, and never-ending complaints about Onslow’s long-suffering wife, Charlotte. To many of them, the author has scribbled additional caveats: ‘quite private’, ‘unintelligible’ or ‘this requires explanation’, expecting that whoever is reading the Verses to possess more context than is being given. Very helpful for the modern reader, who has few other primary sources to compare it to!
I was tasked with making a resource that could help the team make sense of this vast and unusual document. It was as much an exercise in data collection, identifying titles, dates, marriages and events. I matched nicknames to full names in family records and plotted locations travelled to on a map so that they might be more easily identified by anyone reading the Verses. Our priority was to understand who appears in the text, using the Verses to reconstruct the social circle around Thomas Onslow. A second, related, aim was to get a sense of the events being referenced. In asking these questions, the initial links between the apparently disparate entries in the Verses began to emerge.
My findings suggested that Onslow was closer than expected to the relations of his first and second wives, given that his own immediate family was so small. In collating and comparing the names that appeared, I was also able to understand who else the Onslow family interacted with, including the objectifying way that the future Earl wrote about the many aristocratic women that he admired. There was a clear political circle that the family kept, and I found it particularly interesting to watch the artistic circles emerge, as the future Earl writes of his interactions with writers and painters.
There is a thoroughly rich cast of characters that populate the Verses. Several literary women make appearances, including Sophia Burrel, Frances Burney, Ann Lindsay and Barbarina Ogle. There are letters from Danesfield, Brighton, from London to Weymouth, Clandon to Bath, and several other National Trust properties mentioned: Uppark, Saltram House, Ankerwycke Priory. In one musing, Onslow recalls viewing the painting of Elizabeth Locke, née Jennings, which I discovered was by Thomas Lawrence. In another, Onslow watches a play at Bentley Priory, ‘with the parts fill’d by Lady Cahir … and Mr Lawrence the painter.’ Lawrence also painted Lady Cahir—is this the meeting where it took place? It was a joy to see the social world around these paintings evoked in writing.
This week just scratched the surface of what the Family Verses can reveal about Clandon Park's history. Much remains unclear, such as when and why it was compiled in this unusual way. Was it all written by the same hand? What are the precise dates for the work? It seems these questions will continue to be explored at Clandon Park, where the Verses will go on display when it reopens in 2029. I was particularly grateful for the volunteers Suzanne Cliffe and Cicely Edwards, who transcribed the near two hundred pages of the "Family Verses" for this project so that I could access the manuscript digitally."
Anna Braddick is a postgraduate student in Musicology. She researches visual and material cultures of the musical body and less-than-civil instances of music-making in early modern Europe. In her spare time, she can be found in Oxford’s museums, where she shares her enthusiasm for musical ceramics and seventeenth-century portraiture with unsuspecting visitors.
