MC 996

Inventory to the John Alexander Symington Collection: Introduction and Original Manuscripts

By Irving Blum, Peggy Sherry, and Sarah Rodgers

April 2013

Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.

Finding aid encoded in EAD, version 2002 by Tara Maharjan, April 2013

The arrangement and description of this collection was funded in part by a grant-in-aid received from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Links to Other Sections of Finding Aid

The Inventory to the John Alexander Symington Collection has been divided into four sections. This first section describes the collection as a whole and also provides a container list for the Original Manuscripts (including the Supplement) that are housed in boxes 1 to 17. The second section provides more detail for the contents of the Theodore Watts-Dunton Letter Books. The third section lists the Thomas James Wise Correspondence. The fourth section details the subject headings used for the collection's Reference Materials. Click on one of the links below to go to another section.

Introduction and Original Manuscripts (including Supplement)

Theodore Watts-Dunton Letter Books

Thomas James Wise Correspondence

Reference Materials

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Scope and Content Note

The Symington Collection consists of three groups of material of varying size and scope. The first and most important of these groups, at 10.2 cubic feet, is comprised of bound and unbound original manuscripts and autograph letters that are sometimes accompanied by transcripts, clippings, engravings, and bibliographical data. Most of this material dates from the 1850s to the 1920s and relates to the poet Swinburne and his circle. Because this group also includes an autograph collection of more general scope, however, the overall date span reaches back to the 1600s. The second group, of 2.66 cubic feet, consists of correspondence received between the 1880s and 1933 by the book collector, editor, bibliographer, and forger Thomas James Wise (1859-1937). The third group, of 14.8 cubic feet, contains Reference Materials, consisting mostly of transcripts made by John Alexander Symington (1887-1964) from original manuscripts located primarily at the Brontë Museum in Haworth, the Brotherton Collection of Leeds University and the Ashley Library of T.J. Wise at the British Museum, but also now at institutions in the United States such as the Huntington Library. (1)

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS

There are manuscripts in this section of major interest because of their individual significance, such as the Branwell Brontë manuscript entitled "The History of Angria, I," and/or because they form distinct subsets, such as the forty Algernon Charles Swinburne manuscript fragments together with his ninety autograph letters to William Michael Rossetti, the one hundred and fifty manuscripts, manuscript fragments, and letters of the author and translator George Borrow, the fifty-one autograph letters from French novelist André Gide to Edmund Gosse, the seven volumes of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton letter books, and the T. Crofton Croker volume of papers of the poetess Laetitia Landon, as well as the smaller but still significant sequences such as the five Arthur O'Shaughnessy letters and two manuscript poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the ten letters by Charlotte Brontë's biographer Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell and her family, and the six letters of Harriet Martineau.

Patrick Branwell Brontë

The most significant item in the Original Manuscripts section is a bound nine-page manuscript by Patrick Branwell Brontë, known as "The History of Angria, I" (1836). (2) It appears to be an anomaly in a collection otherwise devoted to papers of Swinburne and his circle. However, Symington, who had earlier served as the bibliographic secretary of the Brontë Society, edited the Brontë juvenilia together with T.J. Wise for the Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës' works in 1936 (cf. The Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë in two volumes). His intense interest in the Brontës, particularly Branwell, led him to acquire, sometime before 1935, this manuscript from among the series of stories Branwell and Charlotte wrote together between 1829 and 1840 about the imaginary country of Angria. The events of Branwell's own life are documented at certain moments in this story, as Winifred Guerin has demonstrated in her biography of Branwell, but the plot also draws upon contemporary French and English history.

"The History of Angria, I" is the greatest gem of the Symington Collection. Its text averages a thousand words to the page in microscopic writing and relates the adventures of Captain Henry Hastings, narrated in the first person, including a dinner party at the Earl of Richton's palace, Northangerland's speech before the populace, advocating naval reform, a visit to the royal palace for tea with the Duchess of Zamorna, and a debate in the House of Commons on naval reform. The notes to the facsimile printing of 1936 indicate that a leaf of the manuscript is missing. The manuscript today consists of one less leaf than is shown in that facsimile. What is now missing excises the end of Northangerland's speech and the tea party with the Duchess of Zamorna. (3)

It is evident from clippings in the Brontëana folders of the Symington Collection's third section, the Reference Materials, that Symington regarded the publication of the juvenilia in facsimile in 1936 as the occasion for a Branwell Brontë revival. He felt that it would vindicate a scholar and a poet who had according to local legends been no more than a drunken failure. Among the copies of Brontë writings filed as "Selected works" in the Reference Materials section are several transcripts of the juvenilia, prepared by Symington for the 1936 edition, including "My Angria and the Angrians," "The Duke of Zamorna," "Fireside Tales: the Return of Zamorna," and "Mina Laury," all by Charlotte. With them is Symington's bound transcript of a story Branwell wrote at the age of fifteen in the first person about being abducted by pirates, published in facsimile in 1936 as "The Pirate by Everard Bellingham." (4)

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The most significant Swinburne material in the Symington Collection is clearly the ninety letters to William Michael Rossetti, rich in allusions to their literary activities. Rossetti's replies are to be found as transcripts included in the Reference Materials section. These letters are especially interesting with regard to their work on Blake in the 1860s. In 1863 the Rossetti brothers completed and published Alexander Gilchrist's biography of Blake, the second volume of which contains a catalogue by William Michael Rossetti of Blake's art which is still respected by Blake scholars. It was also meant to include an essay by Swinburne on Blake's poetry, one which was eventually published, however, as an independent monograph of about three hundred pages (cf. Bonchurch edition, Prose Works, vol. 6), and comprises the first serious full length study of Blake's work in the history of literary criticism.

The date span of these letters is such, 1862-1906, that one has a view of Swinburne's Blake both early and late. He writes to Rossetti on 26 October 1906, for instance, "Have you tackled Vala yet? I might have tackled it in my twenties I don't think I shall at the close of my sixties, though I have not at all outgrown the fascination of Blake." Even today, despite the advent of the Blake industry in literary criticism, readers of every age group are reluctant to tackle Vala, or the Four Zoas. (5)

These letters also exhibit Swinburne's preoccupation with two other matters "exquisitely vexatious to the Christian Britannic mind" (cf. letter of 13 October 1866), the revolutionary politics in Europe, particularly Italy, and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Swinburne began writing political poetry in earnest around 1867, when he met Mazzini. The Symington Collection includes manuscripts of two poems from Songs before Sunrise (1871), "The Ride to Milan" (bound in a volume entitled "Eyes") and "The Halt before Rome." Various other fragments suggest the same preoccupation, such as the 1889 fragment "Rome and Nola."

The letters to Rossetti are also full of references to the ideas of the Marquis de Sade. Interesting in this third context are Edmund Gosse's copies (in the Reference Materials) of Swinburne's letters, 1860-1902, to Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, the fifty-seven originals of which are owned by the Marchioness of Crewe in England. (Gosse and Wise edited excerpts of this correspondence for a private printing in 1915.) This series of letters helps to explain the untiring jokes about de Sade in the Rossetti letters. Milnes was famous for his library of erotic arcana, especially the works of Sade. As a poet and biographer in his own right who knew everyone in literary circles and had the wealth to entertain them at his estate at Fryston, Milnes was also, of course, a key figure in introducing Swinburne to the British literary "aristocracy" of the early 1860s. (Between 1959 and 1962 Cecil Lang brought out the six volume edition of Swinburne's letters, of which the Rossetti and the Milnes correspondences form the most substantial parts). (6)

The Original Manuscripts section contains about twenty letters from the art critic and scholar John Ruskin who championed the Pre-Raphaelite movement and admired Swinburne's early poetry. In a letter dated 12 September 1866, at the time of the publication of the first edition of Poems and Ballads, he writes to Hartley Coleridge, "[Swinburne] is so boundlessly beyond me in all power and knowledge." Swinburne's father, Sir John, on seeing the letter to Coleridge, writes back immediately thereafter, in a manner perhaps representative of the "Christian Britannic mind," with regard to his son's poetry, ". . . they contain passages that give us great pain and sorrow . . ." and goes on to wonder why the author could have developed that way: "in early life he was very reverent and intensely admired all things great and beautiful." Ruskin writes back, 18 September 1866, "You ought not to be pained . . . the more I read it, the nobler I think it."

In the context of Swinburne correspondence, mention should also be made of the thirty-eight letters, 1875 to 1898, from the Presbyterian minister A.B. Grosart to the poet, regarding Grosart's well known reprint editions of rare Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. That period of literary history amounted to a virtual obsession on Swinburne's part, beginning with his days at Eton. Indeed, the Symington Collection includes a bound volume, including leaves of a register from the Eton library, showing that Swinburne was already reading those playwrights as a school boy.

Swinburne did some editorial work of his own, among other things, by writing a preface to Charles Wells' play Joseph and his Brethren. Wells, a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, was not popular in his day, but his play, revived by Swinburne and Rossetti, was much admired after its reprinting in the 1870s. Two letters in the collection relate to this work, one from W. Smith Williams to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, written in the 1860s, and one from F. Pollock, written to Swinburne in 1891.

Swinburne was a master at the imitation of poetic style, whether the satiric couplets of Dryden or the blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatists. The collection contains the manuscript of an early version of one of his Border Ballads (cf. Bonchurch edition, Poetical Works, vol. 3) entitled "Burd Margaret," which is said to have fooled Northumbrian townspeople most familiar with oral traditions into thinking it a genuinely ancient ballad.

Of the Swinburne manuscript fragments the most significant consists of one hundred sixty lines, or about one half, of an early draft of the fifth chapter of the nine chapter epic poem Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and is entitled "Iseult at Tintagel." This fragment has been used by scholars to demonstrate how relentlessly Swinburne could revise his writing, countering complaints of posterity about redundancy, obscurity and contorted grammar in his poetry.

The collection also includes excerpts of drafts of Swinburne's unpublished translation of Euripides' Cyclops. Swinburne, well schooled in classical Greek, disliked Euripides but admired Shelley, to whom he is often compared, and it is against Shelley's translation, still the standard English version of the play, that his more daring version works and is of greatest interest.

Of similar interest, in the context of Swinburne's classical skills, is the fragment containing two stanzas, showing part of an exchange between Oeneus and the Chorus, from an early draft of Atalanta in Calydon (1865), the verse drama in the classical style which did more than any other publication to secure his fame as a poet. It is bound together with two other manuscript fragments in a volume entitled "Poems and Ballads--MSS--1866."

Swinburne's activity as a novelist has been relatively ignored by literary historians, but the Symington Collection contains some interesting evidence of it. There is, for instance, a two hundred twenty five line manuscript, undated, but probably dating back at least to the 1860s, entitled "Letters, a Novel in Verse." Of more particular note, however, are the proofs, at least one corrected in the author's hand, of the 1901 and 1905 editions of the epistolary novel, à la Laclos, Love's Cross Currents, originally published as A Year's Letters in 1877 under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Horace Manners" in order not to vex his father. With them is to be found a handwritten copy, not Swinburne's, of the final draft of the novel, but with corrections in the author's hand. Several leaves are missing.

The bound volume marked "'My Lady' and other Pre-Raphaelite Poems" provides evidence of the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite-style on Swinburne's art. Swinburne probably wrote these poems just after he had first met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris when they were working on the Oxford Union murals in 1857. Swinburne championed their style with his review of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, published in the Spectator in 1862 and sometimes regarded as the first literary statement of "art for art's sake" in England. He broke with the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic as early as 1868, but remained close enough to its exponents to feel it necessary to make another break with a refutation of Whistler's art in 1888.

Partly French by extraction and fluent in that language, Swinburne was strongly influenced by French romanticism, particularly the works of Victor Hugo. He wrote almost four hundred pages of essays on Hugo's writings in the course of his career. Of special interest in this regard in the Symington Collection are the bound volume marked "Victor Hugo, MS" and the bound volume of two autograph letters to Swinburne of 1885 and of 1888, the first, from Henry Norman, requesting that he write something on the occasion of Hugo's death. The former volume contains a manuscript page of panegyric verses to Hugo, which begins "This, tho' our praise embalm thee," not the same poem, however, as the published eulogy "To Victor Hugo" in volume 3 of the Poetical Works in the Bonchurch edition. (7) Also in the "Victor Hugo" manuscript volume is a page of notes in French which may not have anything to do with Hugo because they deal simply with erotic freedom.

Other Swinburne fragments present in the Symington Collection reflect the poet's treatment of the imagery of Christianity after his fall from the church while a student at Oxford. Swinburne came from a Franco Catholic background and had been until that time an ardent Catholic. There is a volume of parodic manuscript verses about Christian discipline addressed to Bishop Jackson. Another volume contains an unsigned manuscript entitled "Life after Death." These may, in fact, have been undergraduate exercises, a situation which also suggests itself with regard to the manuscript of verses entitled "Epicurus" and the parody of Arnold's "Empedocles."

Another fragment, entitled "Song," is said to be an effort on Swinburne's part to write a conclusion to Keats' unfinished poem Hyperion. Special Collections and University Archives holds a copy of a rare edition of Swinburne's Hyperion by Swinburne's biographer Georges Lafourcade (X PR5506.H8 1927), containing an essay on Swinburne's relation to Keats. Compared with the fragments reproduced there, the one in the Symington Collection may show the influence of Baudelaire more strongly than the Miltonic strain of Keats' verse. The other pieces with "Song" read as though more directly influenced by Keats' diction. (8)

Yet another Swinburne fragment, beginning "Mother of life and love and death and fear," is strongly reminiscent of "Laus Veneris" (Poems and Ballads, 1866), exhibiting the same stanzaic design as that poem. It is to be found in the bound volume marked on the outside "Manuscripts," and inside "The Holograph Manuscripts of Miscellaneous Verses." (The title of "Miscellaneous Verses" as used here does not correspond to that title as used in the Bonchurch Edition.)

Also included among the Swinburne papers in the Symington Collection is "Notes on the Life of Mary Stuart," a twenty-eight-page notebook about the life of Mary Stuart who captured the poet's imagination in the works Chastelard, Bothwell and Mary Stuart. At the end of this notebook is to be found a fragment of the manuscript of an article Swinburne published on Mary Stuart in The Fortnightly Review in 1882. A fragment in the volume "Manuscripts," beginning "Pass north between the doors of lead and gold," makes mention of Bothwell in its concluding verse.

Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton

Swinburne's lifestyle with Watts-Dunton at the Pines between 1879 and 1909 is most notably captured in print by Max Beerbohm's essay "No. 2 The Pines" in his And Even Now (1920). Reading such an essay prepares one only for disappointment on approaching seven volumes of original letter books of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton in the Symington Collection, for, despite the fact that he describes himself in at least one letter here as "bohemian to the core," the solicitor's dignified restraint prevents Watts-Dunton from conveying any particularly striking impressions of daily intercourse with his famous companion in the circa 1800 pages (1889-1907) of outgoing letters which are copied into these volumes.

Watts-Dunton's friendship with Swinburne, of course, grew out of his capacity as a solicitor, when Ford Madox Brown recommended his services to the poet in the early 1870s, after Swinburne had become disillusioned with Charles Augustus Howell and also found himself in the process of trying to change publishers from Hotten to Chatto & Windus. The Reference Materials section contains a bound volume of typescripts of letters, marked "Watts-Dunton: Typescripts of letters to and from Swinburne and Chatto & Windus," which were exchanged between Watts-Dunton, Swinburne, and Chatto & Windus and illuminate this period.

The recipients of the letters represented in the Watts-Dunton letter books are indexed alphabetically at the front of each volume. Among those addressed are artists Ford Madox Brown, Edwin Abbey, and Max Beerbohm, authors Hall Caine, Edmund Gosse, Clement K. Shorter, Ernest Rhys and George Meredith, publishers of Harper's Monthly Magazine, editors of Oxford University Press and Dodd, Mead & Co., several typewriter manufacturers, and Swinburne family members (the poet's sisters Isabel and Alice, and his cousin Mrs. Disney Leith, nee Mary Gordon).

These letters touch upon such matters as the commissioning and composition of Shakespeare commentaries by Watts-Dunton and other literary notables of the time for Harper's (cf., for instance, Watts-Dunton's essay on Macbeth in Vol. CXII, no. DCLXXVIII, for November 1906, pp. 813-819); the publication, translation, and possible dramatization of his novel Aylwin, based upon the character of his close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti (cf. the Rossetti transcripts in Reference Materials, as well as the original letter from D.G.R. to Watts-Dunton, undated, for further evidence of their intimacy); his research on Hungarian gypsies for his novel Carniola (cf. letters to James Webster, Dr. Andrew Moody, Margaret Fletcher, F.L. Liepnick, Andrew McCormick, Bradford Colt de Wolf, and Emil Reich, included here); his role as a solicitor; and Swinburne's attitudes and lifestyle (cf. letters to Arthur Waugh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Chatto & Windus, Henry Arthur Jones, Robertson Nicoll, and Isabel Swinburne).

George Borrow

George Borrow (1803-1881) enjoyed almost as great a popularity in his time as did Byron. This is in part related to his polyglot skills, his dashing appearance, and his love of travel, especially in association with gypsies. He is best known for his travel narratives, The Bible in Spain (1843) and Wild Wales (1862), and autobiographical writings, Lavengro (1851) and Romany Rye (1857). He also published many translations, including two collections of poems from the Danish, a Chinese version of the New Testament, and Targum (1835), a collection of pieces from thirty languages and dialects.

The Symington Collection includes sixty-six Borrow poems, poetic fragments, transcripts and translations of poems, including extracts in Persian, German, and French, of which three leaves are in another hand. It also contains seventy-one prose fragments, including portions of Lavengro and Wild Wales, extracts in Persian, translations from Welsh and Icelandic, and commentaries on religion, folklore, poetry, and philology, some accompanied by typed transcripts. Longer items include "Songs of Scandinavia," an eighty-five-page manuscript of poetic translations, published in 1826 as Romantic Ballads translated from the Danish, and a thirty-six-page manuscript fragment of Romany Rye. There are also letters from Borrow to his stepdaughter Henrietta MacOubrey, 1870s and undated, the draft of a letter from St. Petersburg, 1833, to an unknown recipient, an undated letter about pruning trees (Borrow gained an estate to care for when he married), and a one-page booklist.

Edmund Gosse

In the course of his life, 1849-1928, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote over thirty volumes of literary criticism. The Symington Collection contains undated manuscripts of his introductions to George Borrow's "The Gold Horns" and "Danish Ballads," striking for comments such as that in translating "The Gold Horns" Borrow was making available to the British reader a poem as significant as Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Here are also undated manuscript sketches by Gosse of John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others. Gosse was skilled in literary portraiture. The story of dining with Tennyson on 13 April 1877 is especially memorable. The passages on Swinburne were later incorporated into the 1917 biography. All these examples help to exemplify the eye for character which made possible his book-length lives of Gray, Congreve, Donne, Patmore, Sir Thomas Browne, Ibsen, and Swinburne, as well as many shorter sketches of contemporaries.

Gosse was also a popular columnist, essayist, and lecturer. The Symington Collection includes an undated draft of an essay on literary hoaxes, "The Oera Linda Book," eventually published in Cornhill Magazine. (Gosse also writes about this topic in his Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe, 1879). In addition there are lecture notes for "Reading as Recreation," dated 1894, but given often in the course of his career, and for an address to the Association of Library Assistants, delivered in 1906.

Gosse, always a Francophile, was fluent in French and visited the continent often. Also to be found in the collection is a 17-page manuscript from 1891, describing a trip to Alsace-Lorraine. Other travels are vividly recorded as well, as in the eight letters to his wife Nellie, 1881, describing a visit with Robert Louis Stevenson and his family in Scotland, bound in the volume marked "Robert Louis Stevenson." (The researcher will also in this context wish to consult the volume of six letters, with transcripts, from Mrs. R.L. Stevenson to Gosse, 1895-1907, expressing gratitude for his financial and emotional support after her husband's death.)

André Gide's Letters to Edmund Gosse

André Gide (1869-1951) first became aware of Gosse's literary acumen and Francophile tendencies at a public reception during one of Gosse's trips to France in 1904, the year Gosse was appointed Librarian of the House of Lords. Although Gide wrote to him in that year, their correspondence began in earnest in 1909, after Gosse had read Gide's novel La Porte Etroite. It reminded him keenly of his own struggles to liberate himself from a narrow Protestant upbringing, the theme of his 1907 work Father and Son (cf. the letter of 21 December 1870 from his father Philip Gosse). Liberation was to become the motif of a correspondence which lasted until Gosse's death in 1928. Although separated by practically a generation in age from his French counterpart, Gosse was not prevented by his Victorian upbringing from appreciating Gide's moral candour, in fact, supporting his coming out in his writings of the 1920s.

Gide and Gosse enjoyed their first extended visit together in 1911 in London. During that same year Gosse was invited to visit Gide for the first time at his house in Pontigny. They saw one another often after that, the last time being in Paris in April 1928, a month before Gosse's death. Gide was permanently grateful to Gosse for championing his work at a time when it was unknown and little received. Gosse first brought Gide to the attention of English readers in an article in the Contemporary Review in 1909, but enhanced his reputation especially in the famous concluding essay of Portraits and Sketches, published in 1912.

Their extent correspondence consists of 34 letters from Gosse, now in the Jacques Doucet Library collections in Paris, and fifty-four letters from Gide, three of which--20 September 1916, 15 January 1925 and 28 April 1928--are in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University. Of the letters by Gide in the Symington Collection, twenty-two belong to the pre-war period, eighteen to the war years, and ten to the post-war era. The third group is evidence of the most searching exchange between the two friends. These letters were translated, edited, and published in 1959 by Linette F. Brugmans as The Correspondence of André Gide and Edmund Gosse, 1904-1928.

Other Original Letters to Gosse

The Symington Collection contains at least one hundred more letters to Gosse from friends and literary associates, spanning the years 1877-1927. Four are from American novelist William Dean Howells in 1883, 1884 and 1904. Howells encouraged Gosse to make a lecture tour of America in 1884 and 1885. That tour was so successful that Gosse was offered professorships at both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, although he refused both to accept a chair in English literature at Cambridge University which he held from 1885 until 1890.

Also in regard to his American lecture tour is a letter from Matthew Arnold of 9 February 1885. Another letter from Arnold, dated 3 March 1885, pertains to Gosse's Scandinavian research and scholar friends. Gosse learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen, whom he introduced to the British public with a biography in 1907, but he also studied Danish.

Gosse and Henry James were good friends and corresponded enthusiastically about literary matters. The collection includes many transcripts of their correspondence (in print since 1988). One of the original letters pertains to the occasion of a Gosse lecture on the Brontës, a copy of which he sent to James as a present. James writes back on 12 June 1903, thanking him for the "bibliographic pearl" and quipping, "It was time the fatal sisters should have a smile play over them--sullen as I yet figure their 'psychic' response."

Many of the letters to Gosse in the Symington Collection pertain to his entry for Swinburne in the Dictionary of National Biography and to his full length biography, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, published by MacMillan in 1917. Gosse first made Swinburne's acquaintance in the late 1860s in London by submitting poems to him for approval. By 1875 he had established friendships with the entire Pre-Raphaelite circle. Two letters, both of 1917, exemplify the reception of his Swinburne biography, one from H.J. Grierson and another from W.P. Ker.

Other letters reflect Gosse's patient survey, while researching Swinburne, of the poet's surviving acquaintances. There are several letters from Lord Redesdale, all dated 1912, as well as a manuscript leaf recounting Redesdale's memories of the poet as he had known him as a school boy. (Gosse eventualy wrote a separate essay on Redesdale's memories of Swinburne.) One of two letters of July 1915 from R.W. Raper delightedly relates the details of one of Swinburne's visits to the noted Plato scholar and Oxford professor Benjamin Jowett. A letter from May Morris, also from this period, vividly recalls her childhood impressions of Swinburne lying in the grass in the orchard behind her father's house, his fiery hair spread out around him, laughing, as she and her sister sprinkled him with rose petals. Yet another letter, 17 April 1917, from Alice Bird, wife of Swinburne's doctor, relates Swinburne's wish to build himself an anti-Victorian tower seven stories high in which the seven deadly sins would be committed daily.

While writing his Swinburne biography Gosse, with Thomas J. Wise, was also preparing extracts from the Swinburne correspondence for publication. The Original Manuscripts section includes an autograph letter written by Stéphane Mallarmé's daughter Genevieve Bonniot to Edmund Gosse around the time, about her father's correspondence with Swinburne in 1875-1876, when the latter contributed his "Nocturne," an original poem in French, to La Republique des Lettres. (9)

Further evidence of Gosse's cosmopolitan role in international belles lettres is a letter of 12 September 1908 from Tolstoi's secretary V. Tchertkoff about a lecture Gosse gave as chairman of the British Tolstoi Celebration Committee, on the occasion of Tolstoi's 80th birthday.

Among the other autograph letters to Gosse in the collection are thirty-nine, 1894-1925, bound in one volume, from Maurice Baring, relating to his poetry and his travels. Baring was foreign correspondent for the Times in 1912 during the Balkan Wars, hence an accomplished observer of the world around him. Inserted occasionally with a letter is the manuscript of a poem just completed, one of which is apostrophizes Gosse.

Another writer represented among these original letters is poet and playwright John Drinkwater, four of whose letters to Gosse, all dated 1917, are bound together in a volume of yet more letters to Clement K. Shorter along with various reference materials. Drinkwater became famous in 1918 with the documentary drama Abe Lincoln, one of a series of historical plays which also included Mary Stuart, Oliver Cromwell, and Robert E. Lee.

Gosse had notable political friends, especially Richard Burdon Haldane, Viscount Haldane of Cloan (1856-1928), for whom Symington transcribed three volumes of his letters to Gosse, 1904-1928, included in the Reference Materials section. In addition to his work at the bar, twice serving as Lord Chancellor, Haldane was a published author of philosophical treatises and was well read in belles lettres. (Among the drafts of Gosse memoirs included in the collection is an account of Haldane's trip to Berlin in 1906.)

Also of interest in the context of Gosse's scholarly activity in the political sphere are the almost twenty original letters of Mary Ponsonby, 1901-1903, many describing Victoria's temperament and lifestyle, for an article Gosse prepared about the queen after her death.

In the Reference Materials section there are transcripts of Gosse letters to and from another fifty correspondents, including such names as the poet Robert Bridges, letters of 1877-1924, the painter Ford Madox Brown, 1877-1884, novelist Thomas Hardy, 1886-1918, novelist Henry James, 1894-1914, and Swinburne, 1871-1894, among others. Of special note here are the transcripts of letters, 1895-1927, exchanged with Thomas James Wise. Most of Gosse's original correspondence is to be found in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University, where about a thousand correspondents are represented.

Laetitia Elizabeth Landon

L.E.L. (1802-1838), popular in England in the 1820s and 1830s, was a child prodigy who turned out verse from an early age. She first published her work in W. Jerdan's The Literary Gazette at the age of sixteen. Once affluent, her family was in dire straits after her father's death in 1820, depending upon her literary output for support. She became known for such long poems as "The Fate of Adelaide," 1821, "The Improvisatrice," 1824, and "The Golden Violet," 1827. She also wrote fiction such as Romance and Reality, 1831, and Francesco Carrara, 1834. She married George MacLean, governor of South Africa, and moved to Cape Coast Castle in 1838, where she died in the same year. (Landon's life is documented in the biography Letty Landon by Helen Ashton.)

The Landon papers in the Symington Collection originally belonged to T. Crofton Croker (1798-1854), an Irish antiquary, illustrator, and author who worked as a clerk at the admiralty in London during Landon's heyday. She regarded him as a literary advisor. He was also a personal friend of Sir Walter Scott, among others. The bound volume in which these papers survive contains annotations by Croker and others.

This volume includes eighty-three letters, 1827-1838, from Landon to Croker, which relate to her literary activity. Typescript copies are in an accompanying volume. Also to be found here are manuscripts of poems, some in Landon's hand, but unsigned and undated, as well as three manuscript pages of literary reviews by Landon, submitted to The Gentleman's Magazine when Croker became editor. They remained unpublished. There are also thirty-one pages of proofs, corrected in Landon's hand, of her poem "The Zenana," published posthumously in Robert Fisher's The Drawing Room Scrapbook. (10)

The Landon papers in the Symington Collection also include letters to Croker (undated) from W. Jerdan, from Robert Fisher (1832) and from Landon's brother Whittington (1837), as well as letters to both Croker (1839) and Landon (1829) from Mrs. A. Thomson, antiquary and friend of the Landon family. In addition there are letters from Landon to Croker's wife and to the Countess Blessington.

Among the reference materials bound in this volume are a transcript of a letter to Croker, 1839, from Cape Coast Castle, containing a water-color sketch of Landon's grave, press clippings about Landon's death, engravings of Landon and Croker, and a chronology by Symington of Landon's contributions to literary annuals.

Henry Arthur Jones

There are over five dozen original letters, 1884-1900 and undated, from British dramatist Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) to theatre critic Clement Scott in the Symington Collection. Although written early in Jones' career, which extended into the 1920s, they are interesting evidence of the theatre revival going on in England at the turn of the twentieth century. The critical consensus of his time was that his play The Liars (1897) was his best work, but he was also well known for The Tempter (1893), The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), and Michael and his Lost Angel (1896). Jones created a stir among Victorian theatre-goers by attacking Victorian prudery, showing in one of his plays a clergyman guilty of adultery. Jones, once drawn to socialism by his early friendship with William Morris, drifted to the opposite extreme with material success and was often at odds with the more left-wing ideological goals of his Irish counterpart, George Bernard Shaw. There is included here a caricature of the two parrying with swords.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

This American poetess (1855-1919) was the daughter of a Wisconsin music teacher turned farmer. She briefly attended the state university, but took up writing full-time at the age of eighteen to help support her family. She is said to have headed the "Milwaukee School of Poetry" from around 1880 and is associated with the "Erotic School" as of 1888. She published numerous poetry collections, including Maurine (1876), and Poems of Passion (1883), as well as an autobiography, The World and I (1918). Wilcox was compared to Swinburne and Whitman in her time, in what was regarded as her assault on Victorian reserve, an issue which seems especially dated when one discovers that she was lambasted for using the word "kiss" in her poetry.

The Wilcox papers in the Symington Collection include six letters to British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881), dated 30 January, 19 June, 5 October, and 14 November 1876, 15 November 1880 and 13 February 1881, describing her travels, her literary tastes, and her ambitions and struggles as a poet. Wilcox was so devoted to her husband's memory that she tried repeatedly to contact him through spiritualists after his death, and her autobiography deals almost exclusively with the period after their acquaintance began. Hence the letters to O'Shaughnessy, which pre-date that time, are a valuable addition to our knowledge of her career. Also included here are undated manuscripts of two poems, "Rain" and "A Dream," originally inserted into the O'Shaughnessy correspondence. Among the reference materials bound in the volume with the letters are first printed copies or extracts, in the form of clippings, of sixteen other poems, and the record of an undated journalistic debate of Wilcox with Harriet Monroe, reprinted from The National Magazine.

Harriet Martineau

This British writer (1802-1876) was the daughter of a Norwich manufacturer of Huguenot origin who raised her a Unitarian. She traveled extensively as an abolitionist in ante-bellum America, as well as in Egypt and the Middle East. She wrote on religion, political economy, social history, women, mesmerism, and education. Her published literary works include popular children's stories and an autobiography.

The bound volume of her papers in the Symington Collection contains an engraving of Miss Martineau, a caricature showing her with her cat, and five autograph letters and a fragment, including a letter to an unknown recipient (Mr. Rathbone of Liverpool?), dated only "Monday night," concerning her journalistic activities, a letter to Mr. Rathbone, dated only "Friday night," thanking him for several books, a lengthy postscript to a letter to Miss Mitchell, dated 1832, concerning subscriptions to a published lecture series, and two letters to Miss Hennell, 17 April and 23 June 1860, concerning her editorial activities and opinions of several books, as well as a note of 1863, ordering some fabric from Messrs. Wilson & Co.

Included in the Symington Collection Supplement is a letter from Martineau to Marianne Finch, 27 March 1853, concerning Finch's new book, An Englishwoman's Experience in America (1853), women's rights, and John Jane Smith Wharton's book, An Exposition of the Laws relating to the Women of England (1853).

Clement K. Shorter

British journalist and author Clement King Shorter (1857-1926), famous for his biographical work on the Brontës and his collaborative efforts with Thomas James Wise in collecting their papers, edited a portion of the Illustrated London News in the 1880s, the Sketch in the 1890s, and The Sphere, which he also founded, from 1900 until his death. The Original Manuscripts section includes almost forty letters, 1914-1925, from Paul Lemperly to Shorter about book-collecting, as well as a letter from Alice Meynell, undated, about his Brontë work. Transcripts of his correspondence with Watts-Dunton in the Reference Materials section also relate to the latter.

While associated with The Sphere, Shorter corresponded with poet Walter de la Mare. The collection contains eight letters from de la Mare, 1920-1923, relating to his literary activities, as well as to such matters as a visit with Thomas Hardy (cf. also a letter to Shorter from Hardy, dated "Good Friday, 1900"). Another contributor to The Sphere, John Drinkwater, is represented by over two dozen letters, 1914-1922, accompanied by transcripts. All relate to his poetic output, although none of the manuscripts originally inserted in these letters is present, only transcripts of them. One other letter in this group of interest, written to Shorter on 17 October 1892 by poet Robert Bridges, concerns the composition of a tribute to Tennyson.

Transcripts of letters to Shorter from Watts-Dunton, Thomas Hardy, and the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, are also to be found in the Reference Materials section.

Elizabeth "Guggum" Siddall (Mrs. D.G. Rossetti)

On 11 February 1862, Elizabeth Siddall, a strikingly beautiful woman and talented artist, died of an overdose of laudanum, possibly a suicide, after two years of marriage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Swinburne testified at the inquest. During the funeral on February 17th in Highgate Cemetery, Rossetti laid a volume of manuscript poems into the open coffin. He was to have the coffin reopened seven years later in order to retrieve them for publication.

The Symington Collection includes about three dozen letters (plus draft responses) regarding Mrs. Rossetti, all sent to W.T. Freemantle, who, fascinated by the circumstances of her death and funeral, did genealogical research on her for a lecture in her hometown of Sheffield in 1912. Several letters, November-December 1911, from the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society cover the details of arranging for this lecture. These papers include the lecture notes (in various sizes). Some of the letters were exchanged in the course of his research. An example of this type of exchange is a letter from one Reverend Spink of a church in Sheffield where Freemantle hoped to find the baptismal records of Mrs. Rossetti's parents.

Yet others of these letters are filed under the name of Violet Hunt whose mother was a close friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Because of his lecture, Freemantle was locally acknowledged as the expert on Rossetti's wife, so Hunt was writing to him in the context of her book on the Pre-Raphaelites. Some of Hunt's letters are also inscribed with Freemantle's notes. At that time, in 1923, Mrs. Rossetti's own work was on exhibit at the Tate Gallery. There is also an exchange with William Michael Rossetti in 1911, relating to these drawings.

The Reference Materials section contains three folders of biographical materials collected by Freemantle in the course of his research.

Robert Southey

Robert Southey (1774-1843) became poet laureate in 1813, thanks to the mediation of his friend Sir Walter Scott, after a prolific career as a poet and historian. He is best remembered for such poems as "The Curse of Kehama" (1810) and "Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), on the positive side, as well as for the disastrous eulogy of George III, "The Vision of Judgment" (1821), on the less happy one. (It was notoriously parodied by Lord Byron.) Southey also knew Wordsworth from living as his neighbor in the Lake District, where he cared not only for his own family but for Coleridge's wife and children as well, after the latter poet abandoned them.

In addition to an undated draft of Robert Southey's delightful poem about Napolean's Russian campaign, entitled "The March to Moscow," there are twelve original letters, February 1798 to April 1799, from Robert Southey's good friend, Grosvenor Bedford, a writer and civil servant whom Southey met while a pupil at Westminster School, the most prestigious boy's school in England (along with Eton) at that time. Together they authored an article against flagellation in a school publication, an essay for which Southey was later expelled. The two friends corresponded for over forty years, and their letters are rich in allusions to the literary and social concerns of their time.

Single Manuscripts

There are about five hundred people represented in the collection by only one or two items, an autograph letter and/or a manuscript fragment. Unlike the larger groupings of original material, which are related in one way or another to nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, these items are eclectic in range both as to date and as to subject area. Included are letters and/or manuscripts by artists, noblemen, politicians, authors, editors, businessmen, and scientists, dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Among the single items are a number of documents, both signed and unsigned. The researcher will find, for instance, two Commonwealth documents from 1654 and 1658 written on parchment and decorated in ink. A more unusual item from that century is a portion of a document dated 1668 regarding power of attorney for a women named Elizabeth Hobart. Also of interest are a promissory note, dated 13 December 1692, a copy of a certificate, dated 1783, signifying the end of Richard Woodhouse's apprenticeship to a London vintner, a copy of a will from 1780, an undated memo having to do with the duty upon tallow candles, a petition from 1743 having to do with landholders, and an 1847 military commission. There is also a section of a coroner's report from the year 1778 relating to an aging squire (Thomas Gerard) who shot one of his servants in the middle of the night, thinking that a robber was breaking into his bedroom.

Of interest in the context of military history is a letter from Theodore Gordon, dated 22 January 1823, regarding the auditing of public accounts for the British army which had "served in North America." There are also items relating to Guillaume Brune, a general in Napolean's army who was killed at Waterloo, Sir John Byng, Earl of Strafford, who served in Wellington's campaigns, and General Sir William Gomm, who fought against the French at Waterloo.

With regard to heads of state, there is a portion of a document in German containing an autograph of Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia, undated, as well as an early copy of Queen Elizabeth's opinion about the keeping of treaties, undated, and letters from Jean Pierre Boyer, president of the Republic of Haiti, and Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec. There are also quite a few items relating to the British nobility, often accompanied by engravings of their mansions, as well as their autographs and portraits.

In the area of art and artists are to be found an undated letter from the French romantic painter Eugene Delacroix and an edifying letter from John Ruskin to George Boyce written in 1854, critiquing the use of light and shadow in Boyce's sketches of Venice. There is also a letter from F. Leyland, one of the principal customers for the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti during his lifetime. In addition there are sketches by one Richard R. Brown, as well as letters of Fred Barnard, an early Dickens illustrator, and of caricaturist Alfred Crowquill. The painters represented here are too numerous to list exhaustively, but include Lady Katherine Bell, Robert Anning Bell, Robert Beattie, John Boaden, Joseph Cartwright, W.T. Davey, and others. One real novelty is a letter from 1827 by architect Jeffry Wyattville regarding the design of the clocks in Windsor Castle.

The items relating to authorship are many and varied as well. There is, for instance, an undated portion of a letter of recommendation written by Victor Hugo. Also to be found here are the notes for a libel trial from the 1850s involving the poet Walter Savage Landor, famous for his literary and political quarrels. There is also a fragment of a note by Anne Thackeray, inscribed on the back of a portion of a letter. Of special interest for Bram Stoker devotees is a letter from a reviewer named Addison Bright in 1890 when Stoker was manager of the Lyceum Theater in London but had not yet written Dracula (1897).

On the business side there are items of great variety, including a letter from one Alfred Gibson about buying violas, a letter from Henry Fauntleroy about a banker just hanged for forgery, a letter from Elizabeth Eastlake about the Governesses' Benevolent Institution and a letter of 1773 from one J. Tempest to one Thomas Plumbe about the purchase and maintenance of phaetons. Among the businessmen of most relevance to the provenance of the collection are a number of antiquarians, including Humphry Rolleston, member of the Royal College of Medicine, who writes in a letter of 1924 about medical bibliophiles interested in diagnosing the ailments from which famous writers suffered.

There are scarcely enough items of interest to the religious historian for this category to be included here. Examples include letters from a curate of the Rugby School named E.M. Goulburn, a Bishop of Litchfield named Samuel Butler, and a biblical scholar named William Trollope.

Historians of science will find a surprising number of mid-nineteenth century items relating to geology and fossil hunting in the British Isles, most of which derive from the papers of Caleb Burrell Rose. The names include Thomas Amyot, John Brown, Henri Milne-Edwards, Edward Parry, Caleb Burrell Rose, Harry Seeley, Joshua Trimmer, Searles Valentine Wood, Henry Woodward, and Samuel Pilkworth Woodward. The Rose folder includes a broadside advertising his lecture of 1854 on "The Eye of Man and Animals," given at the Mechanics Institute in Downham.

Also relevant to the science category is a letter of Henry Oldham from 1843, for anyone interested in the early days of obstetrics, as well as an annotated portrait of Dr. Walter Charlton, physician to Charles II, a letter from Thomas Bryant, head of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a 1750s letter from Malcolm Flemyng about work on the anatomy of the horse. There is also an item written by William Cubitt, civil engineer and inventor of the treadmill. Other disciplines represented here include optics (John F. Goddard), ornithology (John Gould), farming (George Dempster), astronomy (William R. Hamilton), and botany (J. Stewart).

Supplement

In 1959 the Rutgers University Libraries purchased from Symington another group of materials, largely from the papers of Sir Edmund Gosse, now to be found in the Supplement to the Original Manuscripts. This material includes a set of photographs showing Gosse at home in his study in Regents Park, in a group portrait with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and on a visit to his friend André Gide in Pontigny.

The Gosse materials in the Symington Collection Supplement also include press releases by Gosse and galley proofs of essays with corrections in his handwriting, as well as reviews of some of his best known works, including his first book of poems, On Viol and Flute. Among the materials in the folders marked "Documentation" are to be found papers relating to his receipt of a French honorary degree at the Sorbonne in 1925, together with the transcripts of a diary kept by a friend who had accompanied him on that occasion. Although there is manuscript material in the other documentation folders, none of it is in Gosse's handwriting. The material in the folder marked "Miscellany" includes a tiny envelope containing testimony of the christening and the death of Gosse's favorite kitten Yoland.

Also to be found in the Symington Collection Supplement are three Gide letters to Gosse from the war years, as well as a letter from Harriet Martineau to Marianne Finch about feminism, dated 1853.

THOMAS JAMES WISE CORRESPONDENCE

The second group of material in the Symington Collection, letters received by Thomas J. Wise between 1886 and 1933, documents the influence of the greatest bibliographer and book-collector of his time in the English-speaking world. Most of this correspondence affords an overview of Wise's affairs in the 1920s and 1930s, although some material dates back to his earlier career.

There are, for instance, twenty letters, 1886-1912, from H. Buxton Forman, which date from the time when both Forman and Wise were active in the Shelley Society. (11) As members of that group they helped to edit Shelley's manuscripts. The letters from Forman are of special interest because Forman is suspected of collaborating with Wise on his forgeries. One from 17 February 1890, for instance, documents the locations of the three William Morris poems which Wise and Forman were to forge into a first edition pamphlet. There are other places in the letters which are more indirect but also suggestive, having to do with the technical problems of their printing projects. Barker and Collins in their sequel to the Carter and Pollard study An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934) have pointed out the main evidence in the Buxton Forman correspondence for his complicity with Wise.

Ironically, Wise was regarded as the authority on others' attempts to hoodwink the antiquarian consumer, as demonstrated here in letters such as one from Sydney Cockerell, 1931, regarding that role, from Edward B. Hall, 1930, concerning Swinburne forgeries in particular, from Constance K. Fletcher, 1932, about pirated editions, and, most notably, from Harriet Gaylord, 1933, requesting further information about the origins of the Reading edition, 1847, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets, the forgery upon which Carter and Pollard made their first breakthrough in their investigations of Wise.

The more typical correspondence ranges from simple invitations to requests to visit his library on the part of researchers from England, America, Europe and even India, working on topics to which the unpublished holdings of Wise's Ashley Library were necessary. Among these are to be found letters from such individuals as May Morris (1931) who was writing a book on her father, John Livingston Lowes (1929) when he was working on Coleridge, Arthur Waugh (1930) while writing his biography of Gosse, and John H. Ingram (1907 and 1910), noted for his research on Edgar Allen Poe. Many letters consist of descriptions of books for sale, requesting advice about their proper price. Some of these are from professional bookdealers, such as Chapman & Hall and Quaritch, but most are from private owners who need money. There are many examples of letters from libraries which are acknowledging receipt of Wise's catalogues on such figures as Pope, Byron, Dryden, the Brontës, Landor, Swinburne, and others. There is also a run of about ninety letters from the public library in Hampstead, where Wise lived, many of which pertain to materials borrowed from the Ashley Library for local exhibitions.

The Reference Materials section contains transcripts of Wise's correspondence with Gosse, about .33 cubic feet, 1893-1928. In addition to their wealth of information about the market for books and manuscripts, and about the activities of Swinburne's two editors, these letters illustrate the cultural prejudices and presuppositions of a successful literary critic and a top-ranking bibliographer in the first quarter of the century in England.

REFERENCE MATERIALS

The reference materials in the third group include copies of bibliographic catalogues and of title pages for writers ranging from the Brontës to Joseph Conrad. The copied Conrad title pages are of special interest because some show the author's signature, coming from presentation copies to Thomas J. Wise.

There is an abundance of newspaper clippings, especially relating to the Brontës. These tell of such things as the activities of the Brontë Society, especially the opening of the museum at Haworth and the placement of a memorial panel of stained glass for Charlotte Brontë in Haworth Chapel, but also document film and stage adaptations in the 1930s of the Brontës' lives and works.

Among the reference materials here are also nine folders on Sir Walter Scott, containing assorted clippings, pictures and caricatures, copies of illustrations to his novels, biographical and bibliographical data, facsimiles of several letters and manuscript pages, and copies of articles from The Border Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, and SMT Magazine devoted to Scott on the occasion of his centenary in 1932. Symington did original research and editorial work on the papers of Sir Walter Scott.

Another curiosity included here is a set of genealogical tables for Richard Monckton Milnes which demonstrate his distant relationship to Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë's biographer.

Much of the Reference Materials consist of transcripts, some handwritten, but most of them typed, of letters which were still largely unpublished in 1948 when Rutgers acquired the Symington Collection. Some of the most outstanding, such as a selection of Henry James' letters to Sir Edmund Gosse, have only been in print since 1988. Among the people whose correspondence is represented by these copies are George William Fairfax and his family (Yorkshire nobility who settled in Virginia in colonial times and repatriated to England around 1900), Edmund Gosse, Thomas J. Wise, George Gissing, Max Beerbohm, Thomas Hardy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, A.E. Housman, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, John Singer Sargent (who did a portrait of Gosse), H.G. Wells, Arthur Symons, the Brontës, the Rossetti brothers and Christina Rossetti, Edward Clodd (a banker intimate with late nineteenth century London literary circles), John Addington Symonds, Bram Stoker, Mary Russell Mitford, John Ruskin, Robert Southey, and George Moore.

The transcripts are often in sets. In addition to the James letters to Gosse, mentioned above, which are in two folders, there are, for example, fifteen folders of letters in transcription from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, nine of them (including one volume) addressed to Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton.

Some of the transcripts, such as those of Brontë correspondence, primarily letters from Charlotte written after the success of Jane Eyre had made her famous, still have research value. The thoroughness of Brontë scholarship has been such that even the essays in French which Charlotte Brontë wrote while in Belgium for M. Heger (included in this group as transcripts together with his corrections) have since been published and even translated. However, a complete edition of Brontë letters has yet to appear.

The Brontës' letters were slow to be unearthed. The collection contains a transcript of a letter from M. Heger to Ellen Nussey (7 September 1863) advising against the publication of Charlotte's letters. Ellen Nussey herself was resistant to the activities of dealers and collectors. There is a transcript of a letter dated 29 January 1894 which reads, "I am growing very angry with Mr. Shorter and his professed friend Mr. Wise -- If they do not mend their doings, it will be serious for them by and by. They are not shewing themselves gentlemen." Ellen Nussey sold Wise her Charlotte Brontë letters and then claimed that they had been stolen.

Especially interesting in the context of Brontë letters is a bound volume containing a copy of an essay by the Brontës' mother Maria on the subject of poverty, together with the transcript of a letter to their father beginning "My dear saucy Pat."

In addition to transcripts of Brontë letters, the Reference Materials contain copies of articles by Brontë Society members, scholars, and admirers from academic and popular sources. They range in style from the undocumented sentimental outpourings of T. Wemyss Reid, the veritable founder of the Brontë cult (copied from MacMillan's Magazine in September 1876), to an extract from the more serious study by C.P. Scott of the structure of Wuthering Heights, published by the Woolfs in 1926 at Hogarth Press.

There is also a bound volume of about eighty extracts from the letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Charlotte's first biographer. Their quantity suggests that Symington may have been working on her biography. Anyone interested in Mrs. Gaskell will also want to consult the two volumes in the Original Manuscripts section containing autograph letters by her, her husband, and her daughter, although there are none there to the Brontës. (Mrs. Gaskell knew Charlotte for only a short time before her death in 1855.) Two of the autograph letters, from Mrs. Gaskell to John Stuart Mill, relate to a controversy that arose between them over a reference in her biography of Charlotte.

Of particular interest outside Brontëana are sets of transcripts of letters by authors now considered too minor to be edited, such as the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston (1850-1887), represented here by a bound volume of transcribed letters to Algernon Charles Swinburne which are full of enthusiastic impressions upon reading his poetry and of his aspirations in that medium. Swinburne's other correspondents are also well represented in these transcripts, including not just such important connections as John Nicoll, but also the more private Rabelaisian ones, such as Charles Augustus Howell and Michael Field, a friend who tried transvestism. There are also transcripts of many letters from Lady Jane Swinburne to Watts-Dunton, full of gratitude for Algernon's rescue.

Another example of unpublished but interesting material is the bound volume of transcripts of letters, 1880-1914, together with reference material relating to Hall Caine (1853-1931), a British novelist from the Isle of Man, popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, who befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1881 to become his secretary until Rossetti's death in 1882.

Filed at the end of the Reference Materials are .8 cubic feet of transcripts of family papers of the Fairfax family. Symington did genealogical research for Lord Fairfax, who had returned to Britain to be naturalized as a British citizen around the year 1900. These transcripts show that Fairfax's ancestors include the famous Cromwellian General Sir Ferdinand Fairfax of the seventeenth century, as well as the Fairfaxes of Fairfax County, Virginia, who befriended the young surveyor George Washington in the early eighteenth century, only to become estranged again when Washington exhibited revolutionary tendencies against the British crown. The Fairfaxes had been long standing members of the Yorkshire nobility. Symington's research may have served to aid Fairfax in regaining his peerage after his return to England.

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Notes

(1) This text was written in 1990, with only selected later changes.

(2) This story is the first of ten chapters. Manuscripts of the other chapters are in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, the Brontë Museum in Haworth, and the Ashley Library Collection at the British Museum.

(3) Tradition holds that Wise tore up Branwell Brontë stories and scattered them all over the world. This may or may not explain the missing page.

(4) The Rutgers University Libraries own three private printings of Branwell Brontë manuscripts, all acquired with the Symington Collection: one, 1923, is John Drinkwater's edition of Branwell's translations of the first book of Horace's odes; the second, 1925, titled The Leyland Manuscripts (ALEX PR4168 .B76L4), consists of Branwell's letters to the sculptor Joseph B. Leyland, written between 1842 and 1848, one of which is signed with the name of Northangerland; and the third, 1924, is of his novel fragment "And the weary are at rest . . ." (X PR4174 .B2A7).

(5) Of particular interest in this context is a letter filed under the creator's name in the Original Manuscripts section, addressed to Edmund Gosse from the Shakespeare critic A.C. Bradley in 1917, written after reading Gosse's new life of Swinburne. In the letter Bradley remarks that although he usually finds Swinburne's effusions impenetrable, he is impressed with the intellectual acuteness and strength of the Blake commentary.

(6) In the context of Swinburne's friendship with Milnes, the researcher will want to consult the sixty-odd letters of Milnes, filed in the Original Manuscripts section, addressed to Robert Browning, Lady Sidney Morgan, and others.

(7) There is a volume of seventy Hugo illustrations, with duplicates, in the Reference Materials section. It is one of a limited edition published in London by Nichols in 1895.

(8) Swinburne is usually compared with Shelley, not Keats, as in Leslie Brisman's article "Of Lips Divine and Calm: Swinburne and the Language of Shelleyan Love," in Harold Bloom's anthology of critical essays, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 205-218.

(9) Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers owns a copy of a private printing by Thomas J. Wise in 1913 of Swinburne's letters to Stéphane Mallarmé (X PR5513 .A34). In these letters there is also mention of the possibility of Swinburne's contributing something about Blake. Nothing under Swinburne's name ever appeared, but Lafourcade speculates (p. 240 of his 1932 biography of Swinburne) that Swinburne's French poem "Nocturne" was not actually the only work by that poet to appear in Mallarmé's journal. There is an article on "des artistes estranges" (meaning Blake and Swinburne) with a byline of "Herbert Harvey" which he thinks may have been a pseudonym for Swinburne himself.

(10) Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers holds an example of this series with "poetical illustrations by L.E.L." (X AY11 .F533D3 1840).

(11) The researcher will not want to overlook the volume of William Michael Rossetti's letters in the Original Manuscripts section which contains a draft of a letter to Percy Florence Shelley from the year 1889 requesting a loan to keep the Shelley Society afloat, accompanied by a note to Thomas J. Wise, the Shelley Society secretary, instructing him to copy, sign and send it.

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