Peter George Beal, FBA, FSA (16 April 1944 – 31 May 2024) was a British manuscript expert and indexer.
Life and career
Educated at the University of Leeds, Beal worked in publishing as an editor before entering the auction house Sotheby's in 1980, where he was director of the department of printed books and manuscripts from 1996 to 2005.[1] Beal's achievements at Sotheby’s were considerable. His achievements at Sotheby’s include: 1) catalogued the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s papers for the sale of their entire estate; 2) cataloguing Winston Churchill’s papers ; 3) He working on the only letter written in Arabic, by Lawrence of Arabia; 4) cataloguing the papers of Ted Heath and other statesmen; 5) the papers of Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll’s “Alice”), the Thomas Hardy collection of Fred Adams, papers and letters by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Beal was responsible for editing the Index of English Literary Manuscripts[2] between 1966 and 1993. This was a project to produce a full catalogue of manuscripts of 128 key authors from the period; spanning 23,000 entries, it included authors with entries in The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1974). He supported an AHRC-funded project to digitise and update the index; this was launched in 2011.[3][4]
In 1998, Beal was editor or co-editor of the British Library's series English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700.[5]
^Beal, Peter, and Oxford University Press. 1998. In Praise of Scribes : Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.
^"In Praise of Manuscripts," The Book Collector 49 (no.3) (Autumn 2000): 328-348.
^S. P. Cerasano. and Steven W. May., eds. In the Prayse of Writing Early Modern Manuscript Studies : Essays in Honour of Peter Beal. 2012 1. publ ed. London: British Library.
^Gibson J. review of In the Prayse of Writing: Early Modern Manuscript Studies: Essays in Honour of Peter Beal.Renaissance Quarterly. 2013;66(4):1476-1477.