70 fascinating facts you might not know about the Royal Literary Fund

To celebrate our 235th birthday, here's 70 things you might not know about the RLF

235 years ago, on 18 May 1790, our founder the Reverend David Williams and several of his friends sat down for the first committee meeting of what is now the

Royal Literary Fund

. Williams had been inspired to create a Literary Fund to aid authors in distress after the death of his friend Floyer Sydenham, an elderly translator of Plato's works, who died penniless in a debtor's prison.

Over two centuries later, the RLF continues to support writers across many genres. So to celebrate our 235th anniversary, we've put together a selection of fascinating facts about the RLF from across the years.

1. The RLF, which was known simply as the Literary Fund before receiving royal patronage, is not only the oldest literary charity in the UK but also the oldest literary charity in the world.

2. Early records held in our archive at the British Library show that there were approximately 22 members at the first RLF committee meeting on 18 May 1790. Each member – then called a ‘subscriber’ – put in 10 guineas each.

3. When author AA Milne died in 1956 he left the rights to his Winnie-the-Pooh books to four beneficiaries: his family, Westminster School, the Garrick Club and the Royal Literary Fund.

4. As well as Milne, playwright and novelist William Somerset Maugham, war poet Rupert Brooke and authors Arthur Ransome and GK Chesterton all left portions of their estates to the RLF after their deaths.

5. In the first ten years of the RLF there were 103 beneficiaries, and the Fund dispensed approximately £1,500, which is around £2 million in terms of today’s income.

6. The RLF's Fellowship scheme, which provides writers with earning opportunities by placing them in universities and institutions to support students with their writing, began in 1999. Since then, over 850 writers have worked at 106 higher education institutions across the UK, from Aberdeen to Southampton and Derry to Norwich. The Fellowship also works with a dozen Oxbridge colleges.

7. Eight university partners were part of the first RLF Fellowship scheme. We still work with one of the universities to this day – Swansea University, who have Fellow Lisa Parry in residence.

8. RLF Consultant Fellows are experts in leading workshops for academics, PhD researchers and university staff. Over the past year, our Consultant Fellows have run 149 writing interventions in 25 universities and academic locations.

9. In 1806, a young Prince Regent, Prince George (later King George IV) was invited to support the Fund and presented the charity with a house at 36 Gerrard Street, in London's Soho, which is now better known as today's Chinatown.

10. The Fund was awarded a Charter in 1818 and permitted to add ‘Royal’ to its title in 1842. This was largely thanks to the enthusiastic support of Prince Albert, who made an appearance at one the committee’s celebrated dinners in that same year. We have been known as the Royal Literary Fund ever since.

11. The first person to apply for a grant was Lieutenant Samuel Stanton, of the Ninety-Seventh Late Regiment. His books included The principles of duelling; with rules to be observed in every particular respecting it, published in 1790. His application was rejected, but the second applicant – the Reverend Edward Harwood, a biblical critic and scholar – fared better, making four successful applications between 1790 and 1793.

12. The RLF's digital archive, which was catalogued by Dr Matthew Sangster, lists every applicant between July 1790 and November 1939, and includes applicants who were unsuccessful. During this period there were 3,662 applicants in total.

13. Our tenth applicant was the Chevalier d'Eon, a celebrated 18th-century soldier, spy and diplomat for King Louis XV of France who famously lived openly as a man and then from 1777, presented permanently as a woman. After a falling out with a superior, d'Eon published French diplomatic secrets in Lettres, memoires et negociations, one of the most scandalous books of the age. d'Eon was also the subject of much scrutiny because of repeated speculation about their gender. d'Eon ended up living in poverty and applied for and received two grants from the RLF, one awarded shortly before their death.

14. A number of French political writers and refugees to have applied to the RLF during the period of the French Revolution, including François-René de Chateaubriand, one of France's best-known early Romantic writers, who received support from the RLF in 1799 when he was exiled in London.

15. Charlotte Lennox was the first female author to apply for a grant. She was a Scottish author and critic whose novel The Female Quixote (1752) is said to have influenced Jane Austen's much better known Northanger Abbey. Both are satirical books centred around a young heroine with a passion for romantic literature. Lennox received several grants from 1792, resulting in a pension of one guinea per week which continued until her death.

16. One of the first RLF Fellows was the late Michael Abbensetts, who wrote Empire Road (1978), British’s first Black TV drama. Michael’s play, Alterations, was recently staged at the National Theatre, in an adaptation by another RLF Fellow, Trish Cooke.

17. Gothic writer Eliza Parsons – who wrote 65 novels in 12 years, all published by then-renowned romantic fiction house Minerva Press – first applied for a hardship grant in 1792. Two of her books, The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Mysterious Warning, are referenced by Austen's character Isabella Thorpe when she lists her favourite so-called "horrid novels" in Northanger Abbey.

18. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the founders of the English Romantic Movement and a friend of William Wordsworth's, applied to the Fund twice – once in 1796, and then again in 1816.

19. WritersMosaic, our online magazine showcasing UK writers of the global majority, launched in 2021. Colin Grant is the Director and in the four years since its inception, it has featured contributions from Roger Robinson, Gabriel Gbadamosi, John Siddique, Amanda Vilanova, Franklin Nelson, Peter Kalu, Sharmilla Beezmohun, Michael Salu, Hannah Lowe, Sunila Galappatti, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Mirza Waheed, Louise Doughty, Kerry Young, Bashabi Fraser and many, many more.

20. WritersMosaic has recently partnered with the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation on a series of poetry films which sees writers Jo Clement, Marjorie Lotfi, Jason Allen-Paisant and Anthony Anaxagorou perform two poems, including one of their own works, on film. In the latest film, poet Jo Clement reads 'Kubla Khan' by RLF beneficiary Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

21. The first writer of children's books to request assistance was Elizabeth Somerville, a Scottish novelist born in Lanarkshire. She received two grants in 1801 and 1821.

22. The RLF's Bridge programme of workshops was devised by Katie Grant to bridge the learning gap between school and university. It launched in Scotland in 2013 and in England and Wales in 2018. Today, the Bridge team consists of 64 writers working in secondary schools, sixth-forms and further-education colleges across the UK’s regions. Since its launch, the RLF's Bridge Fellows have worked in around 800 schools and colleges, reaching over 30,000 students.

23. Bridge has operated in locations in Orkney, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Wight, and workshops have even taken place at a disused nuclear power plant and a glade in the Forest of Dean.

24. Regina Maria Roche, another Gothic fiction writer referenced by Jane Austen – her book Clermont is also one of Isabella Thorpe's "horrid novels" – applied to the RLF for a grant in 1827. You can read more about our forgotten Gothic female writers here.

25. Another peer of Jane Austen's, Mary Russell Mitford, applied to the RLF for a grant in 1843. Mitford was a prolific letter-writer and once wrote to her friend Sir William Elford about "our great favourite, Miss Austen...". Mitford's Our Village stories were hugely popular in her lifetime.

26. Romantic poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, whose work was immensely popular in both the US and her native UK during her lifetime, applied for a grant in 1835.

27. A number of RLF Fellows and grant beneficiaries have won the Forward Prize for Best First Poetry Collection, which has been running since 1992. Helen Farish (2005), Emily Berry (2013), Phoebe Power (2018) and Marjorie Lotfi (2024) join a list that also includes Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald and Ocean Vuong.

28. RLF Fellow and poet Basir Sultan Kazmi MBE – who previously supported students at the University of Bradford and has also written extensively on the personality and poetry of his father, the famous Urdu poet Nasir Kazmi (1925–72) – was awarded an MBE in 2013 for services to literature as a poet.

30. In 1800, the Fund's committee hired a Clerk to carry out administrative work, deal with accounts and correspond with applicants. In 1836, this was replaced by the newly created role of Secretary. The Secretary had more responsibility, overseeing much of the Fund's operations. Our last Secretary was Eileen Gunn, who retired in 2021 and was succeeded by our current Chief Executive, Edward Kemp.

31. Between 1966 and 1982 the RLF’s Secretary was Victor Bonham Carter, an English author and scriptwriter who was also a farmer, writing extensively about rural affairs. His uncle was the grandfather of renowned British actor Helena Bonham Carter, the current (and first female) president of the London Library.

32. The longest-serving Secretary was writer Octavian Blewitt, who joined the Fund in 1839, the same year Charles Dickens became part of the committee. They did not always see eye-to-eye, as Dickens was reported to call Blewitt "the Pious Octavian" and "the Blessed Blewitt".

33. Blewitt managed correspondence from Matthew Ferstandig, a man who described himself as "the head of oriental and classical literature in the United Kingdom" and applied to the RLF 17 times in total. Every one of these applications was unsuccessful, as Ferstandig had in fact never published a book. He was still outraged enough to start a campaign against the Fund, pinning up a poster saying:

You have practiced your delusions on the minds of the public by introducing the worthless scribblings of women. You have kept up a seraglio of 82 women and voted annually 1,275 pounds and 6 pence out of the Literary Fund for their support. These and other charges, which decency forbids any further description, are acts of treason which you have committed against literature, literary men, the public, and the rising generation.

Matthew Ferstandig

34. Charles Dickens famously had a tumultuous relationship with the RLF. He became Steward of the annual dinner in May 1837, was elected to the Committee in 1839, then barred from reelection for non-attendance. During his tenure he became disillusioned with how the Fund was managed and attempted to reform it from within. In 1856 he published a paper called Household of Words, which proposed radically revitalising the Fund, after a failed attempt to set up a rival fund called Guild of Literature and Art in 1850. Despite Dickens being elected Chair and recruiting many allies to his cause, his ideas for reform – which involved proposing to turn the Fund into a 'Literary Institution of Great Britain' – were voted out.

35. In 1896, Elizabeth Dickens – the widow of Dickens' son, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, who was editor of his father's newspaper All The Year Round after Dickens' death – applied to the Fund and received a grant.

36. During his tenure, Charles Dickens recommended and supported a number of grant applicants including Scottish poet Charles Mackay, the playwright John Poole and the Austrian-Jewish historian Ernst Stein von Skork.

37. In 1997 the RLF set up the JB Priestley Award in memory of the English playwright and screenwriter JB Priestley, who died in 1984. Priestley was a former trustee and long-time supporter of the RLF and requested funds from his estate should go towards helping a new generation of writers after his death.

38. The first person to receive the RLF's JB Priestley Award was Scottish author and playwright Ali Smith. Other writers to have received the award in the 28 years since its launch include Tobias Hill, Stephen Kellman, Rosalind Harvey, Emily Mackie, Courttia Newland, Sameera Steward and Joe White.

39. Aside from Octavian Blewitt, other secretaries of the Fund included Cusack Patrick Roney (1836-1837), Whittington Henry Landon (1837-1839), Arthur Llewelyn Roberts (1884-1919), Hugh John Cole Marshall (1919-1945), John G Broadbent (1945-1966), Victor Bonham-Carter (1966-1982), Antony Mackenzie Smith (1982-1986) and the first female secretary, Fiona McKenzie Clark (1986-1999).

40. From 1990 until 2003 the RLF's president was Sir Stephen Tumim, who was also Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons – a role that overlapped his tenure as RLF president by five years.

41. Other RLF presidents include Ian Fleming's agent Peter Janson-Smith; playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood; Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl with a Pearl Earring; and our current president Sir Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive of the Science Museum Group.

42. Author, broadcaster and Britain’s then youngest and first Black female book publisher Margaret Busby, who received a grant from the RLF in 1997, went on to become one of our Trustees. She is also a former Chair of the Booker Prize, and in 2023 was appointed President of English PEN.

43. During the Victorian period, the Fund also became famous for its committee dinners which involved 17 different toasts, with music played with drinks served between each piece. These dinners were attended not just by writers, but also politicians and figures from the armed forces, with guests including Lord Palmerston, Stanley Baldwin, Dr Livingstone and Rudyard Kipling all in attendance. The event was only open to men, but women were permitted to sit in the gallery. The dinners continued until 1939.

44. A letter by Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë includes reference to one of the RLF Committee dinners. She writes:

I do regret one treat, which I shall now miss. Next Wednesday is the anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund held in Freemasons Hall. Octavian Blewitt, the excellent Secretary, offered me a ticket for the ladies' gallery... I should have seen all the great literati and artists gathered in the Hall below and heard them speak. Thackeray and Dickens are always present among the rest. This cannot now be. I don't think all London can afford another sight to me so interesting.

Charlotte Brontë

45. In 1902, Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, made the first of two successful applications to the RLF. He was supported by Forsyte Saga novelist John Galsworthy, among others. Galsworthy said of Conrad: "No living writer of English, to my mind, better deserves support."

46. In 1911, Bram Stoker wrote requesting assistance 14 years after the publication of his genre-defining novel Dracula. He writes of having first experienced a "paralytic stroke" in 1906, shortly after the death of the stage actor Sir Henry Irving for whom he had worked, and the impact this had on his health. Read more about Stoker's original letter here.

47. 2025 marks the third year of WritersMosaic at the Hay Festival where Colin Grant will host two events – Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary and We Were There.

48. WritersMosaic has staged several events at the British Library, featuring music and spoken word performances as well as writers in discussion. Previous event topics have included James Baldwin, Latinx poetry, Caribbean lyrical writing. The next event will explore the legacy of Frantz Fanon.

49. During the First World War, DH Lawrence applied twice to the RLF for a hardship grant. The first was in September 1914, the year after the publication of Sons and Lovers, and the second was in July 1918. Both applications were granted.

50. Edith Nesbit also applied to the RLF shortly after the onset of the First World War in 1914, declaring she was struggling to look after her family after her husband had contracted smallpox. This was many years after the release of her best-known novels for children and young adults – Five Children and It was published in 1902 and The Railway Children in 1906.

51. The RLF's Writing For Life programme, which launched in 2017, places writers in community groups and workplaces around the UK. In the past eight years Writing For Life has worked on 180 projects, employing 59 writersand helping over 10,000 people by running workshops in community centres, trade unions, foster care, hospices and refugee and asylum seeker groups. Writing For Life also works closely with NHS trusts in England, with 15 writers working across eight different trusts.

52. The RLF’s community-based Reading Round groups, which are part of the Writing For Life programme, have run in over 100 locations from Derry in the West to Cambridge in the East and from Fife in the North to the Isle of Wight in the South. Venues have also included the Glasgow botanical gardens and a ‘peace yurt’ in a City of London churchyard.

53. Many notable writers have written letters of support for grant applicants over the years. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan; Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the secretaries to Benjamin Disraeli and Rudyard Kipling; Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray; renowned modernist writer Virginia Woolf; novelist Anthony Trollope; British crime writer Agatha Christie; Yorkshire-born poet and author Ted Hughes; Henry James, author of The Turn of the Screw; Creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis; Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the influential American poet and critic Ezra Pound are just some of the well-known writers to have sent letters of recommendation.

54. One writer supported by Yeats and Pound was James Joyce, who received a grant in 1915, also during the First World War. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was being serialised in Pound's Egoist periodical at the time. The financial aid from the RLF enabled him to escape Austria-Hungary to Zúrich, where he continued to work on his next novel Ulysses.

55. Writer Dorothy Richardson, a major figure in the 1920s modernist prose movement that included Joyce and other authors such as Proust, Woolf and Faulkner, applied twice to the RLF in her lifetime.

56. Monique Roffey, who later wrote the Costa Book of the Year award-winning The Mermaid of Black Conch, applied for an RLF grant in 2009. Monique is also an RLF Fellow, having previously supported students at the University of Sussex and the University of Chichester.

57. Another Costa Book of the Year winner is Andrew Miller, whose novel Pure won the award in 2011; Andrew was an RLF Fellow at the University of West England in Bristol.

58. Other RLF Fellows to have previously won a Costa Book Award include Selima Hill, Jo Shapcott and Jonathan Edwards, who won the Costa Book Award for Poetry; and Diana Hendry, Patrick Ness, Brian Conaghan and Jasbinder Bilan, who were all winners of the Costa Book Award for Children’s Books.

59. In the 1920s two children of legendary Russian writer Leo Tolstoy – author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina – applied to the RLF. His son, Count Lev Lvovich Tolstoy, applied in 1923 and was unsuccessful. His daughter, Countess Tatiana Lvevua Sukhotin, applied in 1927 and her request was granted.

60. Dylan Thomas's first application to the RLF in 1937 was denied, but he made two further applications to the RLF which were granted. The Welsh poet was supported by TS Eliot, the novelist Hugh Walpole, poet and critic Edith Sitwell and Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. His wife, the author Caitlin Thomas, also wrote to the RLF requesting support.

In a letter, Thomas wrote of his application requests:

What I need now is a small, regular income. The garrett idea is repugnant to me. I'm not a fine weather poet, or a lyrical tramp, or a bright little bow waiting for the first fine flush, or a man who cuts his face with a grand phrase while shaving. I like regular meals, and drink, and a table, and a ruler, and at least three pens.

Dylan Thomas

61. At Aberystwyth University two Fellows – Elin ap Hywel and Menna Elfyn – have supported students working in the Welsh language as well as in English, and at St Mary’s University College in Belfast, Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin has provided support for students working in the Irish language.

62. The first woman to be admitted to the Fund's Committee was writer and biographer Rose Macaulay in 1940.

63. Gormenghast author and illustrator Mervyn Peake applied for a grant in 1948 while writing the second book in the series. He continued to receive support from the RLF when his health deteriorated in the 1960s and he was no longer able to work. His wife Maeve Gilmore was so grateful for the support, she left a legacy to the RLF in her will.

64. After divorcing and moving to London with her children, author Doris Lessing sought financial assistance from the RLF in 1955. Lessing went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, becoming the first and – to date – only British female writer to receive the award.

65. With educational institutions across the world dealing with the challenges posed by students’ use of generative AI, the RLF’s Bridge for Schools toolkit – which is continually updated – explores the topic with students, demonstrating intelligent use of AI tools and the continued importance of critical thinking and questioning sources.

66. Bridge also works in partnership with many libraries and organisations across the country including the British Library in London, the National Library of Scotland and Glasgow's Mitchell Library as well as with public local libraries, museums and arts organisations.

67. In 1966, novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, a prolific writer of books focusing on family life in the late Victorian and Edwardian upper middle class, applied for and received a grant. This was 11 years after she had been awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel, Mothers and Son, in 1955. For more on Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stuart Jeffries takes a look at her legacy here.

68. The prestigious Carnegie Medal for Writing has been won by three RLF Fellows: Susan Price (1987), Patrick Ness (2011 and 2012) and Anthony McGowan (2020).

69. The first print edition of the WritersMosaic Quarterly was published in 2025 as an insert in The Bookseller on 9 May 2025 to coincide with the centenary of the birth of Malcolm X and features work by Vayu Naidu, Vanessa Kisuule, Max Farrar, John Siddique, Franklin Nelson, Ella Sinclair, Ekow Eshun, Bonnie Greer and Colin Grant.

70. In 2025 playwright Joe Ward Munrow became the inaugural recipient of the Robert Holman Award, created in honour of the late playwright Robert Holman to support dramatists living and working in the North of England.

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There’s much more about the history of the RLF in our archive. Our physical archives are stored in the British Library, and the digital catalogue is here.

For the latest from WritersMosaic, visit the website here. Editions of the WritersMosaic Quarterly will be available as a print insert in The Bookseller.

You will find all the information you need about making a grant enquiry on the website.

You’ll also find information about the Fellowship scheme, our Bridge programme of schools workshops, our Consultant Fellows, the Writing for Life programme, our Reading Round groups and much more on the RLF website.