Special Collections Report

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS REPORT By Dr. J. A. Edwards, Keeper of Archives and Manuscripts (University of Reading) Visitors to Reading University Library not infrequently ask why a particular collection is held there. Questions of this kind about letters and papers of the period 1880-1920 are easily answered. Since at least 1955, the Department of English at Reading has developed, notably through the work of Professor Ian Fletcher, an Interest in the literature and art of the 1890s. As a contribution to the common stock of materials for study, Professor Fletcher, his colleagues and friends have passed to the Library a respectable body of manuscripts and correspondence for that and later phases of literary history. The Library itself, by purchase and in other ways, has extended the collection, so that it now amounts to an Archive of Contemporary Writing from about the 1890s to the present day. Sensibly linked with the personal papers of specific authors, the Library maintains a unique Archive of British Publishing, including the records of five publishers active from 1880 to 1920. Of these, the best known is probably Charles Elkin Mathews, whose papers (MS 392) comprise letters from writers (Arthur Symons, Ernest Radford, Lionel Johnson, William Watson, W. B. Yeats, Jack Butler Yeats, Laurence Binyon, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and others), from his partner John Lane, and from artists such as John Trivett Nettleship and Walter Crane, with announcements , photographs, prints and cuttings. A microfilm of this collection (made by Charles Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.) is available in the larger American libraries. The correspondence files and ledgers of George Bell and Sons Ltd. (MS 1640), extending from 1840 to 1973, contain letters of or reference to Robert Bridges, Walter Crane, Aubrey de Veré, Austin Dobson, Alfred and Margaret Gatty, Edmund Gosse, Herbert Home, Andrew Lang, and other authors published by the firm. The Longman archives (MS 1393) include unbroken runs of ledgers which reveal in detail the publishing history of Longman books and authors from well before until long after 1880, but letterbooks or incoming correspondence are (owing to two disastrous fires on the firm's premises) almost completely lacking. Chatto and Windus (Mark Twain's publishers) have contributed a splendid series of letterbooks (MS 2444) from 1866 onwards which occasionally contain original in-letters. The letterbooks throw light on Wilkie Collins, Ouida, Justin McCarthy, James Payn, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Grant Allen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Austin Dobson, Walter Besant, and many other Chatto writers. The so-called "authors' files" do not begin until 1915, but there is a variety of ledgers from 1873 which supply bibliographical information. The firm of Macmillan also deserves a note. The more important of its archives now rest in the British Library, but the University Library at Reading also holds Macmillan authors' letters (MS 1089), including items from Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Andrew Lang and Michael Rossetti. A related collection (MS 1448) contains letters written to George Craik of Macmillan from 1890 to 1905 by William Blackwood , David Masson, Alfred Ainger, W. E. H. Lecky, and others. Finally there are forty letters to the publishers Adam and Charles Black dated between 1876 and 1906 (MS 2164) from figures in the literary trade such as William Blackwood, H. W. Nevison, William le Queux, and Sidney Colvin. 80 The name Nancy Astor does not immediately suggest English literature, but among her papers preserved at Reading (MS 1416) are several series of letters from friendly writers, among them J. M. Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. Belloc corresponded with her for thirty years and Shaw for almost as long. She may also have known Herbert Asquith (son of the Prime Minister ), five of whose letters for 1915 to the publisher Frank Sidgwick (MS 1623) about war poems are held at Reading. Asquith's contemporary, Laurence Binyon, is represented in several collections: two stray letters (MS 1852 and MS 1793) of 1911 and 1925 deal with lectures and the publication of poetry. Aubrey Beardsley (MS 160) provides letters to John Henry Gray and Mabel Beardsley; in the same collection are letters from Jonn Lane to Gray and photographs of the Beardsley family. The Library also...