But it is a completely different experience reading the originals. I was able to view some original pamphlets in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and have recently spent a couple of weeks in the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, reading manuscript sources for the MPhil I’m about to begin. I’m still incredibly excited by physical contact with the ’substance’ of history, if you will, so I have a different reaction to the actual ink-and-paper to a computer screen. Besides which, the quiet of a library induces a different state of mind to one’s own desk. You might be able to reprint manuscript texts, and to upload those reprints onto the internet (as has been done at the Internet Archive with some HMC volumes) but this won’t capture the aspects of the manuscript itself. And printed sources uploaded will suffer the same effect.

Are these aspects really important, or is (as according to some literary theorists) the text itself, that is the words, the only important thing? I don’t know that seeing the original can induce completely different revelations than a typescript, provided the latter is accurate. But I enjoyed finding that Admiral Sir William Pennington’s writing faded towards the end of his journal – as, I presume, he ran out of ink onboard his ship – or that Algernon Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had broad, confident writing compared to Pennington’s neat, almost scrupulous, hand. Perhaps they can offer something on an implicit level, impressions rather than anything else.

And of course, these are useful, provided that we understand them for what they are. I think this is the conclusion of the ramble: students and researchers have to be aware of the layers to what they are reading, whether it is an original, a reproduction, a typescript, or an upload of any of these. The increasing reliance on the digital world is highlighting these issues, and may change (to some extent) our positions; but I think it’s a relevant concept to bear in mind when beginning to read any source.