| Description Of Item | This series incorporates both published, fair and draft copies of articles and essays. It is not known whether these were grouped together by the previous archivist or whether this was how Alison himself ordered his papers. The handwriting in the draft notes and articles is very poor and heavily abbreviated so the subject matter is often conjecture. Where the item is described as a fair copy, they are much easier to read. The majority of the items are not dated. In the previous catalogue dates appear to have been estimated dates from the watermarks in the paper, but where no accurate estimate could be made from a date reference in the text, a date range of 1820s-1850s has been entered.
The untitled material starts at AWP/5/1/127. Many of the untitled items consist of miscellaneous pages on a roughly similar subject rather than a complete essay. Again it is not known whether Alison himself made these groupings. There is also a large amount of unidentified material at the end (AWP/5/1/220). |