500 Years of Love in The Archives
- Shanai Tanwar
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
The Love Letters exhibit at The National Archives came up on my boyfriend’s Instagram feed a few weeks ago, appearing like a personal suggestion for a cute date idea.“We should go here,” he suggested to me whilst we did our nightly scroll. As a literature nerd, I immediately responded: “Let’s do it.” I sent him a calendar invite shortly after because sometimes, romance needs a bit of scheduling.
We chose a sunny day at the end of March to make the trek over to Kew, to spend an afternoon celebrating love. Amidst the budding blossoms lining the trees and the sudden abundance of smiling faces in Richmond, the ducks at the Archives’ pond fit right in. It is duckling season after all. The little ones paddle around in the sun like dollops of ice cream melting into the sidewalk. Their mothers keep a watchful eye on passersby who dare venture too close to their babies.
The love letters, shown at the exhibit, span over 500 years, following an emotional journey similar to that of the mother ducks. They tell a story of nurture, care, family, time, and most of all, preservation. It’s The National Archives, so the letters being brought out of their cosy safeguarding alcoves into the public eye feels akin to the mother ducks freeing her babies to bathe in the sun just outside.
The exhibit challenges us to reconsider what constitutes a love “letter.” If only ink-spilt romantic soliloquies met the qualification, then the written record of love would be monotonous in genre. But, like the versatility of all human experience, each lover immortalises their love differently. Take, for example, one of the exhibit’s most prized artefacts—famous writer Jane Austen’s original will, wherein she bequeathed all her possessions to her sister, Cassandra. In Regency-era England, when women barely had property rights (let alone “personal” rights), was it not a radical act of love to hand over all your earthly belongings to your little sister?
In a similar vein, when Indigenous Australians were persecuted in internment camps in the 1840s, it was Dalrymple Johnson’s petition to the colonial authorities for the release of her mother that read like love. It is in these otherwise sterile, mundane government documents that the language of love perforates.
The experience reminds us that who you love is radical, too. We feel it while reading Alfred Douglas’s plea to Queen Victoria to pardon Oscar Wilde from prison, as well as while we gaze at early-20th century ads from The Link, in which queer lovers post coded messages in search of a partner. In a world of growing violence against LGBTQ+ individuals, these letters are a powerful emblem of queer resistance.
At the end of the letter-viewing segment of the exhibit, my partner and I had the opportunity to write love letters of our own. Since we had recently written to each other, we decided to address ours to someone we both love. My best friend, who happens to be his sister, lives thousands of miles away in Canada. She was our hardest goodbye when we moved continents so she felt like the perfect person to write to. We laughed as we wrote our letters separately and shared them with each other, recalling our funny memories with her. But we also acknowledged that it felt a bit strange to write something so intimate about someone we both love so much. To sign off, we both wrote the three simplest, most succinct words which expressed how we felt—”I miss you.” The process reminded us that loving is easy, expressing is hard.
We pinned our letters on the display alongside those written by fellow exhibit-goers. Reading some of the others made us tear up. There were stories from folks who had lost their life partner, and had come to the exhibit thinking of them; from unrequited lovers who lingered on the “if only”; from children who missed their parents; from immigrants who longed for the aroma of homemade food; from little kids who wrote, very simply, “I love you.” My personal favourite was from a lady who dedicated five lines to her most beloved companions, her cats (and drew them too).
As we exited The National Archives holding hands and slipping back into the sun, I couldn’t help but think of how we carry stories of love and loss everywhere we go. Each person’s heart is its own archive layered with the sediments of romance, friendship, family, grief—but not everyone has quite the right words for it.
Some of these words make it into the immortal shelves of the Archives in Kew, where they are on display for the public to see. The rest live inside us, fully coating us in the brief moment of our existence, like the sunshine does to the baby ducks who have just opened their eyes to the possibility of life.
The Love Letters exhibit is free and on display until April 12th 2026 at The National Archives.
Co-edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor and Zarah Hashim, Sex and Relationships Editor
