About
About A Museum of Relationships
A Museum of Relationships (AMoR) is a pilot project funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant and a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant and based at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
It incorporates letters from three sets of William Hayley's correspondence. The main correspondents are the sculptor John Flaxman, Hayley's first wife Eliza, and the poet Anna Seward.
In it, the project team explored how we can best enable anyone interested to explore the networks of professional, social and domestic relationships that underpin and facilitate the creation of literary and visual artworks
The Fitzwilliam Museum holds the world’s largest collection of manuscript material relating to William Hayley (1745-1820)
About William Hayley (1745-1820)
Poet, linguist, classicist, scholar, bestselling author, biographer, dramatist, and amateur physician fascinated by the relationship between madness and creativity, William Hayley was one of the most influential cultural figures of the long late 18th century in England.
He is also one of the least studied, his contributions erased. His correspondence – unedited and largely unpublished – offers a uniquely rich and mostly untapped source through which to map and investigate an extensive network of leading writers, artists and their interconnected professional, social and domestic circles and works.
As well as the three correspondents represented here, Hayley’s friends/correspondents included the visionary artist and poet William Blake, the poet William Cowper, Emma, Lady Hamilton, prison reformer John Howard, artist George Romney, novelist and poet Charlotte Smith, the engraver Caroline Watson, William Wilberforce, poet Helen Maria Williams, and the artist Joseph Wright of Derby.