Leigh Hunt Search Tips

Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters contains over 1,600 letters written to, from, and about Leigh Hunt. Below we have provided some brief search tips that we hope will make your experience of this collection more enjoyable and more fruitful. If you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our Special Collections Department at lib-spec@uiowa.edu. “Browse All” will allow you to browse all of the letters in the collection in chronological order. However, with the exception of three letters written in the 1790s, all of the letters for which we lack a specific year of origin will appear before any other letters. Hence, if you wish to browse letters with specific dates, you will need to jump to page 16, where the first letter written in 1801 appears.

“Browse by Name” will take you to a list of all of the individuals who are featured in the collection as writers, recipients, or topics of letters. Hence, clicking on a name in this list will bring up all of the letters written by, to, or about that individual. In most cases, you will find all three kinds of letters, but in the case of a few names, such as John Keats, you will find only letters written about the individual, rather than by or to him.

The simple search box in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage will allow you to perform a keyword search in the collection. For example, searching for “Brighton” will bring up 60 letters in which that city appears in the descriptive metadata. It is important to note that although every letter has been given a brief topical description, only about 1,000 of the 1,600 letters currently possess full-text transcripts online. Hence, there may be other letters besides these 60 that mention the city of Brighton, but its presence as a topic in the letter was not recorded in the brief description. If you are researching a particular topic and want to find all of the letters that discuss it, it is a good idea to try a number of different search terms.

If you are trying to find a specific letter that you know is in the database, you can often do this by entering its call number (ex. bound MsL H94hum2 leaf 30), or its date of origin (ex. 1823-06-30) in the simple search box. However, the most effective way to ensure that you will be able to re-locate a letter that you have been reading is to record its reference url. This can be found by clicking on the “reference url” link in the gray bar at the top of every letter. If you copy and paste this url into a browser, it will take you directly to the letter in question.

If you are not obtaining the results you desire using the simple search box, you may wish to try the advanced search option. This can be found in the gray bar at the top of any search results page. If you follow this link, you will be given the option to search for words or phrases in selected metadata fields. You can also apply multiple criteria to your search. For example, you might search for letters that contain “Novello” in the personal name subject and that have a chronological subject of 1820-1830. This will retrieve 9 letters. For even greater specificity, you can click on the “show terms” link to the right of each search field in order to obtain a list of the controlled vocabulary used in that field. For example, rather than simply typing “Novello” into the personal name subject field, you could click on “show terms,” scroll down the list to see the members of the Novello family who are mentioned in the database, and double click on “Novello, J. Alfred (Joseph Alfred), 1810-1896” to enter the full Library of Congress Subject Heading for Alfred Novello into the search box. This search will now retrieve just one item, a letter written from Leigh Hunt to Alfred Novello on February 18, 1829. This search tactic can be very useful if a simple search on a topic or individual retrieves too many letters to comfortably browse.