T. E. Lawrence
This page displays resources for those interested in studying the life and writings of T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence’s personal papers are held in various archives, including Oxford University, the University of Texas, Austin, and elsewhere. Typescripts of the Lawrence letters held at University of Texas, Austin are held in the King’s College London Liddell Hart Papers. Digital copies of a selection of these manuscripts, along with Lawrence’s photograph collection, can be viewed below. Other resources accessible below include digital copies of other materials, such as Lawrence’s undergraduate dissertation and a handwritten draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom held at Oxford University.
About the Collection
The Liddell Hart Archives at King’s College London holds original photographs taken by T. E. Lawrence during his service during World War I and at various other points in his life. Lawrence gave these photographs to his biographer, Basil Liddell Hart, who deposited them at King’s. The photographs include images taken of Crusader castles during his trip through Syria as part of his undergraduate dissertation, “The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture to the End of the 12th Century,” subsequently published as Crusader Castles by Golden Cockerel Press in 1936. A typescript copy of Lawrence’s undergraduate dissertation is held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (Jesus College MS. 181). The photographs included in the Liddell Hart Manuscripts at King’s College London include images of fortifications in Syria, Turkey and elsewhere. The collection also includes photographs taken during his pre-war career as an archaeologist.
The Bodleian Library also holds an original handwritten draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This draft is notable for containing passages that do not appear in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars. For example, page 3 of the introduction to the Bodleian manuscript includes a sentence subsequently excised from the printed version of the Seven Pillars. In this passage, Lawrence notes: “in these pages is not the history of the Arab movement but just the story of what happened to me in it. It is the narrative of what I tried to do in Arabia, and of some of what I saw there. It is a chronicle in the spirit of the old men who marched with Bohmond or Coeur de Lion.”
The images in the Liddell Hart Archives include photographs of crusader castles in France, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, as well as Lawrence’s operations in the Hejaz with Emir Feisal (Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi) and various Bedouin tribes during the Arab Revolt. Lawrence’s photographs include images of aircraft, encampments, the movement of soldiers, and sites of Lawrence’s military operations, including a section of the Hejaz rail line near Deraa being destroyed by a “tulip” mine. The Lawrence archive photographs also include images of the Bedouin tribes that served alongside British forces during the revolt against the Ottoman empire, along with depictions of their weapons, clothing, camels, and banners. The collection also includes images of notable figures such as Harry St. John Philby.
The Liddell Hart Archives also include a large selection of Lawrence’s letters, including written responses to questions Liddell Hart posed to Lawrence when writing his biography Lawrence of Arabia. The Lawrence papers are stored in a series of bound volumes that enclose each document in a sealed plastic sleeve that cannot be opened. This creates significant challenges to digitization, as there is significant glare that make image capture difficult.
