Authors fear that large collection of poet’s papers held by Northamptonshire libraries will be threatened by further cuts expected to its service

Hilary Mantel, Alan Moore and Simon Armitage have joined authors raising “grave concerns” about the custodianship of the poet John Clare’s manuscripts in advance of major planned cuts to the library service in Northamptonshire.

The 19th-century nature poet was born in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston to illiterate parents, and worked as a labourer. Known for works celebrating rural life, including The Shepherd’s Calendar and Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, a large collection of his manuscripts, letters and books is housed at Northampton central library, as the John Clare Collection. Authors and academics led by Simon Kövesi, editor of the John Clare Society Journal, have written to the Guardian to voice concern that the collection will be hit by the swingeing cuts expected for the region’s libraries.

John Clare archive under threat from library cuts | Letters Read more

Northamptonshire county council, which is looking to make £115m savings in the next four years, is currently consulting on the future of its library service. Three options have been proposed for the region’s libraries, each of which will see at least 21 of its 36 branches closed. The consultation closes on 13 January.

Although Northampton central library is not threatened with closure, Kövesi and major names including authors Michael Rosen, Philip Pullman and Andrew Motion, as well as Clare’s biographer Jonathan Bate, fear that the plans will see the branch “hugely impacted by reductions in the number, seniority, qualifications and experience of staff that will be retained in that library”.

“Many staff in this library – not mentioned in your plans – are threatened with redundancy or an effective downgrading of their post, no matter what option is chosen,” says the authors’ letter. The letter was also signed by Toby Jones, who played Clare in the 2015 film By Our Selves, the film’s director Andrew Kotting, and by the comedian Josie Long, who performed a standup show about the poet in 2013.

Comics legend Moore, another of the letter’s signatories, is a Northamptonshire native who has written Clare into some of his works. Moore has previously called the council’s proposals for library closures “completely unacceptable and completely monstrous”. “The priorities of this council are appalling,” said Moore in October, adding that the council was “closing down the one means that many people have of actually properly educating themselves”.

Clare, the authors say, is an “increasingly significant poet” and the collection is used by international scholars and artists. The manuscripts ended up in Northampton because Clare was resident in a Northampton asylum from 1841 until his death in 1864. His memorial describes him as “the Northamptonshire peasant poet”.

The letter says: “This collection at Northampton has always been maintained by expert, attentive, scholarly librarians, who do their level best with scant resource to make this publicly owned collection available to readers and researchers of all kinds.

“Our central concern here is that – given the size of the cuts you plan, and the loss of staff and expertise delivered by all of your options – there will be a permanently detrimental effect upon the care and curation of the Clare collection. We worry that this internationally significant collection will no longer be safe in your hands. We would like the council to give public and quantified assurances that this will not be the case.”

A spokesperson for Northamptonshire county council stressed that the central library would be kept in all three of the options currently under consultation, and that there were no current proposals that would affect the archive: “We acknowledge the importance of the John Clare Collection and our responsibility to it. It is not our intention to make any changes that could harm, be detrimental to or reduce accessibility to the collection.”