The collection comprises correspondence with publishers including Longmans and Macmillans; manuscript drafts, working papers, notes and essays, lecture notes for the Royal Naval War College, Portsmouth, reports, press cuttings for his Naval reviews. Also included is correspondence from Naval Officers, Corbett's parents, from his wife E.R.C (previously Edith Rosa Alexander), the Fisher Correspondence and letters to Sir John Pakington, Admiralty, 1858/9, including a series of letters from Sir Houston Stewart to Pakington.

Administrative / biographical background
As an Historian, he published nine principal Naval works and three works of fiction (The fall of Asgard, 1886, For God and Gold, 1887 and Cophetua the Thirteenth, 1889.) Between 1898- 1914, he edited 5 historic works for the Navy Records Society. Serving for many years as Vice President of both The Navy Records Society (NRS) and the Society for Nautical Research (SNR), he was also a member of the Editorial Boards of both societies. In addition, he wrote two articles for the Mariner's Mirror between 1913 and 1921. Amongst his other major titles he was an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, The Director of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Lecturer at the Royal Naval War College, Lectured at Oxford, Cambridge and London and was the Official Naval Historian of the Great War.