We take a look at the wartime correspondence of the writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, with cataloguing manager, Michael St John-McAlister. 

The first thing that strikes you about Dorothy L Sayers’s wartime correspondence is the sheer volume of it. The paper shortage seems to have passed both her and her correspondents by; the collection of her unpublished correspondence, acquired in 2013 and now catalogued (Add MS 89727) and available for consultation in the Manuscripts reading room, comprises thousands of letters. She even had sufficient paper to keep copies of her replies. The paper shortage only seems to have started to bite in 1944; by April that year her order for five reams could not be fulfilled in its entirety and many of her books were out of print.

The first hint in Sayers’s correspondence that dark days were approaching can be seen in the 1938 and 1939 applications for domestic service vacancies in her household from Germans, Austrians, and Czechs, some of whom explicitly stated that they are Jewish. There was no attempt to underplay the situation: applicants were adamant that they would face “the horrors of Hitler’s inhuman concentration camps” and “despair and a sinister fate” if they did not get out. 

A desperate plea on behalf of two Germans, Add MS 89727/2/3.

Once the war started, up to the end of the first half of 1940, the ‘phoney war’ period, there was little indication in her correspondence that there was even a war on, save for the occasional stoic reference to “we must all try and carry on as much as possible” and a local whip round to pay for entertainment for soldiers billeted in Witham, Sayers’s home town, over Christmas.

The lull came to an end with the Battle of Britain followed by the Blitz. From September 1940 onwards her letters reported bombs near her London flat, the neighbouring property to her solicitor being “blown right down”, the destruction of her favourite milk bar near where she used to work and that of St Alban’s, Holborn, and devastation in Bloomsbury. She described Witham as “reasonably bomb free”, however. The only moment of interest was “a bit of a rocket, which sailed into the garden on Christmas Eve”. Even so, the uncertainty of the war still made it difficult to plan ahead: “I will put down the date and hope for the best” was a typical response to an invitation.

Much of the difficulty in planning was of course caused by travel difficulties. The radius of the area she could get to easily gradually contracted. The west and north were impossible almost from the start. By February 1940 she could not “truly say [she was] eager to travel to Derby on a Saturday under war conditions”. Given that it took “such a fearful time getting anywhere by train” she could not commit to “the loss of two or three days work in order to toil to some distant place with trains going through air-raids at 15 miles an hour”. Gradually, as the Blitz bit, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Surrey became beyond reach. She even had to think hard about engagements in London as that train journey could take two and a half hours each way. From 1943 she began to echo the government’s entreaties, asking herself whether her journey was really necessary, and usually answering in the negative. Given these travel difficulties, her lack of sarcasm in her response to a request to speak in Canada was commendable! 

A typical Sayers refusal, Add MS 89727/2/16. © The Trustees of Anthony Fleming (deceased).

As a result of these difficulties Sayers had to turn down far more invitations to speak than she accepted, although she always did her best to meet invitations to talk to service personnel. Apart from travel, other reasons for her turning down invitations included pressure of work or being asked to speak on a subject she knew nothing about (gambling, missionaries, education, the Eastern Church, and writing for children, for example). She also increasingly turned down invitations to speak about religion: she felt that the surprise value of the arrival of an amateur in the field was long since lost once her appearances became commonplace and in the meantime her main job, which had brought her to prominence in the first place, was being neglected. She marked such letters NMR, ‘no more religion’, so her secretary knew to send out a proforma reply. What she called “difficulties on the kitchen front” also caused her to say no to many invitations. The war had left her “practically without domestic help”, such that “I cannot really leave my household completely in the lurch more than about once a month” – one wonders what state of rack and ruin she expected her household would fall into in her absence! She even had to do her own cooking and shopping (“endless time wasted trotting round the town with shopping-bags hoping for fish or biscuits”). 

Sayers’s domestic difficulties, Add MS 89727/2/14. © The Trustees of Anthony Fleming (deceased).

She often said that as she had turned down invitations from the Ministry of Information and the Archbishop of York she could not very well agree to open a village fete or speak at a school prize day.

Apart from morale-boosting talks to servicemen and women, Sayers did much more for the war effort: she took in an evacuee from Stoke-on-Trent; she refused all requests from the general public to sell them duplicates of her books, instead donating them to be sold to benefit war fund charities or giving them to troop libraries; she refused payment for any books she sent to POW camps; she donated warm clothing, board games, and books to the men working the barrage balloon at Coram’s Fields; and she encouraged salvage in Witham and even knitted a single item using moth-ravaged wool found in a drawer. Sayers thought it “a cheerful little work” and hoped the Women’s Voluntary Service would “be able to find a youngster to fit it.” The WVS was so impressed they wanted to put it on display as an example of what could be done with even the poorest scraps of salvage. 

Sayers doing her bit for the war effort, Add MS 89727/2/7. © The Trustees of Anthony Fleming (deceased).

 

And is thanked for her efforts, Add MS 89727/2/7.

In addition, Sayers was part of a circle producing woollen clothing for nominated trawlers and naval vessels. Obtaining wool became increasingly difficult as the war progressed, but even so the ships companies of HMT Grimsby Town, HMS Caroline, and HMS Sussex, among others, benefitted from sea boot stockings, socks, and sweaters.

Sayers also took part in the 1940s version of crowdfunding. She contributed £2 2s to an imaginative scheme, for women called Dorothy, to pay towards the production of a Spitfire. The resulting Mark V model was named 'Dorothy of Great Britain and the Empire'. Sayers also contributed towards a locally-sponsored Hurricane and contributed to fellow author Ursula Bloom’s appeal for money for bullets for Spitfires (12s 6d per 100; Sayers contributed 30s). Interestingly, her papers contain a price list of components for fighter aircraft: subscribers could donate 6d for a rivet or six screws; £75 would pay for a petrol tank; £500 for a gun turret, and so on. 

Crowdfunding the war, Add MS 89727/2/7.

As a writer Sayers was far from idle during the war. Several of her plays were performed, she wrote a number of essays, had talks published, and her 12 part cycle of radio plays on the life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, was broadcast to a huge audience on the BBC to wide acclaim. However, she wrote no new novels or short stories and the hostilities did have an impact on her most famous character. To requests to write more Peter Wimsey stories she would mischievously reply that Lord Peter was engaged in secret work “somewhere in Europe”.

Surprisingly, the end of the war went, mostly, unremarked. Continuing travel issues and shortages were alluded to, but Sayers felt positive. Writing to a Dutch correspondent she expressed the hope that “we shall find the energy and enthusiasm enough to pull our weight in getting Europe on its feet again”. She clearly wanted to do her bit: despite being the grateful recipient of post-war food parcels from fans and well-wishers overseas, she herself sent food and clothing to German friends and acquaintances in the same period; a measure of the type of person she was.

Sayers as recipient and donor of post-war food parcels, Add MS 89727/1/5-6. © The Trustees of Anthony Fleming (deceased).

 

Written by Michael St John-McAlister, Western Manuscripts Cataloguing Manager, who has recently completed cataloguing the correspondence of Dorothy L. Sayers.

With thanks to David Higham Associates, London for permission to quote from the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers.

 

Further reading:

Add MS 89727

James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life of a Courageous Woman (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981).

David Coomes, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life (Oxford: Lion, 1992)

Catherine Kenney, ‘Sayers [married name Fleming], Dorothy Leigh (1893-1957)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35966

Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993)

Ted Hughes, copyright Caroline Forbes

On the 7^th November the British Library will host an event that celebrates and explores Ted Hughes’ second poetry collection, Lupercal. Published in 1960 when Hughes was only thirty Lupercal contains some of the poet’s best-known poems including ‘Hawk-Roosting’, ‘Pike’ and ‘Mayday in Holderness’. In Lupercal we see Hughes’ development from his first collection, Hawk in the Rain, and the beginnings of themes that are considered central to Hughes’ work such as his animal poems and his depiction of the Yorkshire landscape in which he grew up.

The event will be chaired by Ted Hughes’ widow, Carol, who will be joined by poets, Alice Oswald and Zaffar Kunial, and the novelist, Jane Feaver, who worked with Hughes at his publisher, Faber and Faber in the 1990s. Faber is now publishing a heritage edition to mark the 25th anniversary of Ted’s death, and this event brings together speakers with a deep connection to its verses.  

Please join us for an event of discussion and poetry readings, which will provide fascinating insights into Hughes’ work. Please book your tickets today via the Library’s events page.

Event sponsored by Ted Hughes Estate. 

We mark the exciting acquisition of a collection of letters between Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and his wife Ann.

Unlike Ann Fleming, who has had a whole volume of her correspondence published, Ian Fleming was not a habitual letter writer. So the British Library was delighted to be able to acquire this collection of almost 100 letters from Ian to Ann (and over 50 in the opposite direction) in 2021. This major resource for Fleming scholars has now been catalogued (Add MS 89670) and, from today, is available to access in the Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room.

Correspondence of Ann and Ian Fleming. Reproduced with permission of The Ian Fleming Estate. © The Ian Fleming Estate 1946-1964

The letters, most of which are unpublished and previously largely unseen, give an intimate and detailed insight into the shifting sands of Ann and Ian's relationship, from the complexities of the 1940s when Ann was still married to Esmond Harmsworth (in one letter Ian begs Ann to keep his letters well-hidden instead of leaving them in her underwear drawer), through the heartbreak of the death of Ann and Ian's daughter, Mary, just eight hours old, in 1948, their married life (they married in March 1952), and into the 1960s. It was at times a turbulent relationship and both had numerous affairs. The tension and strain of these affairs, as well as that caused by their long separations (even after their marriage, Ian spent three months every year at the house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica, he had built in 1945), is apparent in many of the letters. On the other hand, many other letters are traditional love letters, passionate and romantic, showing the depth of their feelings for each other.

Apart from their relationship, the subject matter of the letters ranges far and wide taking in the flora and fauna of Jamaica; the development of, and domestic arrangements at, Goldeneye; gossip from the newspaper world (Ian Fleming was foreign manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, the then owner of the Sunday Times, from 1945 to 1959 and continued to contribute articles into the 1960s) and discussion of his 'Atticus' column; their respective health, both physical and mental; the health, development, well-being, and schooling of Caspar, their son born in August 1952; and their international travels (India, Tangiers, Chicago, Miami, New York, Paris, Italy, Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Switzerland). They certainly took advantage of the advent of the jet age, but they also enjoyed the more leisurely pace of luxury liners such as the ‘Queen Elizabeth’, writing vivid pen portraits of their fellow passengers as they sailed.

The Flemings were inveterate gossips and a major thread in the correspondence is discussion of the figures within their social circles or passing through their orbit. The cast list of names that crop up – friends, acquaintances, guests at Goldeneye, fellow guests at others’ dinners and social events – is remarkable: Leolia Ponsonby, Blanche Blackwell (with whom Ian had a long affair), Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lucian Freud (“seems to have become world famous at last”), Micky Renshaw, Noel Coward, Truman Capote (“Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me… a fascinating character and we really get on very well” – Capote persuaded Fleming to try “a sinister pill called Mill Town”), Brendan Bracken, Hugh Gaitskell (with whom Ann had a long affair), Erica Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Edith Sitwell, Rosamund Lehmann, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Rex Harrison, Solly Zuckerman, Gladwyn Jebb, Joyce Grenfell, Pamela Churchill, Paul Gallico, Oscar Hammerstein, Charles Boyer, and Sidney Bernstein.

Ian Fleming to Ann Fleming, August 1952. The Flemings clearly had not yet settled on the spelling of their son’s name. The standard sources refer to him as Caspar. Reproduced with permission of The Ian Fleming Estate. © The Ian Fleming Estate 1952

Ian Fleming to Ann Fleming, August 1952. The Flemings clearly had not yet settled on the spelling of their son’s name. The standard sources refer to him as Caspar. Reproduced with permission of The Ian Fleming Estate. © The Ian Fleming Estate 1952

As would be expected, the letters are also littered with references to Ian Fleming's most famous literary creation, James Bond. He offers regular progress reports and occasional plot details, of mostly unnamed books: at one stage From Russia With Love, for example, is described as “galloping along. I have written a third of it in one week, a chapter a day”; another book “is half done and buzzing along merrily in the rain”. Fleming also alludes to some of the inspiration and sources for the stories and titles. For example, he mentions Blanche Blackwell's gift of a coracle, which he named Octopussy. The short story of the same name, written in 1962, would be published posthumously in 1966. 'Blanche' was the name of the guano-collecting ship in 1958’s Dr. No and Blackwell was the model for Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, published in 1959. Truman Capote is described as “twittering with excitement” while reading a proof copy of Diamonds Are Forever. Fleming writes of correcting proofs of Live and Let Die on-board the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ sailing to New York. There is even a reference to the gold-plated typewriter he bought while writing Casino Royale. However, there are also occasional allusions to Fleming's dissatisfaction with Bond as a character (“I have got so desperately tired of that ass Bond”) and with some of the stories (“just finishing a Bond short story of no merit”). Even so, his later letters make reference to possible television and film adaptations of his books, and on a trip to Hollywood, the positive reaction to his books gives him particular hope (“People really seem to be after my books... it’s as usual a question of crossing fingers & waiting for someone to pry them apart & force some dollars between them”). The first Bond film, Dr. No, would be released in 1962.

This is a truly absorbing collection, and there is something of interest on every page. Even the stationery the Flemings used is worth noting. So desperate were they to keep in touch with each other that if actual writing paper was not to hand they simply repurposed the endpapers of books, the back of a gin rummy score card, and even a hospital temperature chart!

We are grateful to the British Library Collections Trust for their generous support for this acquisition.

With thanks to The Ian Fleming Estate for permission to quote from the letters of Ian Fleming.

 

Written by Michael St John-McAlister, Western Manuscripts Cataloguing Manager, who has recently completed cataloguing the Ian and Ann Fleming letters.

 

Further reading:

Add MS 89670.

Mark Amory (ed.), The Letters of Ann Fleming (London: Collins Harvill, 1985).

Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).

Andrew Lycett, ‘Fleming, Ian Lancaster (1908-1964)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33168.

Andrew Lycett, ‘Fleming [née Charteris], Ann Geraldine Mary (1913-1981)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40227.

With cataloguing underway on the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, manuscripts cataloguer, Cameron Randall, reflects on the process and the presence of its previous archivist Murray Melvin.

Working as a Manuscripts Cataloguer, I feel lucky that I can arrive at work each day with the possibility of being transported to past places, previous times, and perhaps most interestingly, entering the lives of those who rise from the collection. A photo, some exchange of correspondence, or an inanimate object can hold stories that have lain buried and dormant among the collection's contents. In some sense, every archive is intrinsically hauntological. Hauntology, as coined by Jacques Derrida, is a spin on the term ontology: a metaphysical inquiry into ideas around being. Where hauntology differs is that it refers to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.

The collection that I am currently working on, the Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive, seems to capture this idea better than most. Running through the body of the collection is another presence that murmurs within the material. A spectre is haunting the archive: its previous custodian, the actor and director turned theatre archivist Murray Melvin.

Murrary Melvin at the Theatre Royal (c) The British Library Board

Murray enjoyed a distinguished theatre, television, and film career, working with directors including Joan Littlewood, Ken Russell, and Stanley Kubrick. He also appeared in 1966’s Alfie alongside Michael Caine, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and the 2004 version of The Phantom of the Opera, not to mention the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. Murray’s first leading role on stage was with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, where he took on the role of Geoffrey in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, in 1958, followed by the seminal role in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, later the same year.  His star continued to rise, reprising his role as Geoffrey in the 1961 film adaptation of A Taste of Honey. This performance would lead Murray to win the BAFTA film award for Most Promising Newcomer and the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor.

Murray sadly passed away in April this year, but his spirit not only lives on through his hugely successful acting career but also in the diligent care and attention he provided to the Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive, which was acquired by the British Library in 2021.

A selection of notes, programmes and other papers relating to theatre unions work in the thirties (c) British Library Board

Murray's influence on the archive cannot be understated; his methodology and instructions are extensive, precise, and deeply detailed. Each box contains Murray's literal and metaphorical fingerprints, from the chronological ordering of the Theatre Royal's productions, which Murray's hands would have sorted, to the micro-precision of labelled photos, designating the date, place, and individuals that sit within them. There are even meta-notes that accompany much of the archive, some with extended pages of long insights, stories, and descriptions that unearth an extra layer of context that enriches the content. In these moments, Murray's presence feels at its most potent; his tone and style of writing have a conversational quality that is not only accurate but provokes curiosity, establishing his personal perspective as an invaluable component of the archive and a lens through which to fully understand it.

Given Murray's long-term personal involvement with Theatre Royal Stratford East and his much greater knowledge of its history, I must adhere to his decision-making, and constrain my natural tendencies in shaping the collection, or even abstain from them all together. In some ways, I have to think as Murray would and respect his arrangement, order, and sorting of the material. In this sense, I feel like I am acting as a vehicle or conduit for Murray's archival logic, trying to stay true to his reasoning and maintain how he intended the archive to be perceived. This is both a blessing and a curse, as on the one hand, Murray guides me box to box, and on the other, his methodology creates inflexibility and rigidity, which I have to contend with as I attempt to pull a thread between Murray and potential researchers in the future.

Doll made by Una Collins and used by Fanny Carby in Oh! What a Lovely War (c) British Library Board

My involvement with The Theatre Royal Stratford East comes through the Hidden Collection initiative, which seeks to remove barriers to discoverability and access in the cataloguing backlog at the British Library. The initiative itself is one that recognises the hidden, invisible, and ghostly nature that collections like these possess. Through the cataloguing process, collections are seemingly revived, the hauntological becomes ontological, and the hidden is unlocked to take on a new lease of life, ultimately making archives available for research and opening up the library's collections. As a troubled Danish prince once put it, 'the time is out of joint', but with the work of individuals such as Murray Melvin, we see the possibility for time to fall back into joint, where the past is resurrected in the present to produce new ideas, other perspectives, and unknown possibilities, reaching beyond the material and into the future.

Further Reading

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (Routledge, 1994)

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2014)

Peter Rankin, Joan Littlewood: Dreams and Realities (Oberon Books, 2014)

Murray Melvin, The Art of Theatre Workshop (Oberon Books, 2006)

Murray Melvin, The Theatre Royal: A History of the Building (Stratford East Publications, 2009)

Dr Steve Ely, senior lecturer in creative writing at The University of Huddersfield, discusses their research on the work of the poet Ted Hughes.

Ted Hughes by Fay Godwin © British Library Board

In 2022 I was awarded an AHRC grant to complete a two-year programme of research entitled Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity. The research is designed to explore and expound the view that Hughes’s most distinctive, original and best work—the work that made his name—is essentially Expressionist, characterised by a visionary subjectivity that transforms content in order to present his own unique view of the world. Although his work is almost always rooted in observation, most clearly so in poems that take animals and nature as their ostensible content, Hughes is rarely content with limiting himself to realist or naturalistic representations. Imagination, argument and didactic intent combine in his work to create symbols and metaphors that articulate his own apocalyptic truths. Beyond this, an important secondary aim of the research is to use Expressionism to understand Hughes in the context of twentieth century movements and tendencies in the arts in general, not simply in ‘English Literature’, thereby facilitating a broader and more nuanced understanding of the achievement and status of an artist still too often understood as a ‘maverick’.

Expressionism is an elusive and contested term, and not one typically applied in Hughes studies, or indeed, in English Literature, and part of my research—and the work of the symposium—will be to explore, expound and critique its meaning in this context. An exciting range of talks—Hughes and German Expressionist cinema, Hughes and Alchemy, Hughes and ‘absolute music’, a number of presentations on Hughes’s relationships and affinities with other artists and writers including Peter Brooke, Barrie Cooke, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Alan Moore, Janos Pilinsky, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, and several analyses of key works, including Seneca’s Oedipus, Crow, Gaudete, Capriccio and ‘Mayday on Holderness’, ‘The Howling of Wolves’ and ‘Anniversary’—will break new ground in doing so. Of course, many of the talks draw extensively on research conducted in the British Library’s rich and endlessly rewarding Ted Hughes archive.

I’m a poet with a dozen or so publications under my belt, including Englaland (2015), Lectio Violant (2021) and The European Eel (2021). However, a lifelong interest in Hughes led to a parallel career as an English literature academic, as Director of the Ted Hughes Network at Huddersfield University, where I also teach Creative Writing. These two strands came together to inform this research. Initially, an interest in developing a better understanding of my own processes and methods of artistic creation led me to explore and become more self-conscious about my own writing in a cross-disciplinary context. This led to the realisation that the application of a similar approach might provide a fruitful method of interrogating and understanding Hughes’s encyclopedic oeuvre, to gain a sense of where—in all that diversity and richness—his main achievement lies.

An important step on the journey to Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity was the publication in 2020 of James Keery’s Apocalypse!, a revisionist anthology of the neglected and maligned poetry of the 1940s, its predecessors and antecedents, in doing so demonstrating the ‘visionary modernist’ context which provided the matrix for Hughes’s emergence—and to some extent ‘explains’ his singularity in the Movement-dominated English poetry scene of the mid/late Twentieth century. In 2022 Professor John Goodby and I organised dual symposia—Apocalypse I and Apocalypse II, at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Huddersfield respectively—inspired by Keery’s work and insights. Apocalypse’ (book and symposia) helped catalyse my thinking and led to the AHRC application and my current research.

Indeed, as the research has developed, apocalypse is increasingly becoming an important concept in helping me to articulate my understanding of Ted Hughes’s Expressionism. There’s a two-fold sense to this. In the Greek, ‘apocalypse’ means a revealing, unveiling or vision—an inner experience triggering an urgent, highly subjective response. Of course, ‘vision’ is a key aspect of Expressionism. However, through the content and notoriety of the Apocalypse of S. John the Divine (the Book of Revelation in most Protestant Bibles), a second understanding of apocalypse—disaster, catastrophe, the end of the world—has become dominant. Much of Hughes’s poetry is concerned to address and articulate apocalypse in this sense, not only in his eco-poetry and his address to the atrocity and conflict that characterises the modern world, but also in his work addressed to ontology and being, his sense that humans are catastrophically cut-off from the spontaneity of their natural lives and are thus not only unable to live in harmony with themselves, their peers and the natural world, but are consequently locked into disastrous cycles of alienation, violence and self-harm. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to come up with a general definition of Expressionism to inform my research. However, I’m increasingly thinking that ‘apocalypse’ might be key: visionary work, rooted in a singular world view, articulated via imagination and addressed to urgent themes, as so much of Hughes’s work is, is almost certain to produce Expressionist work.

Material from the Ted Hughes Archive

Ted Hughes Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity will take place in the Pigott Theatre, Knowledge Centre, British Library on 15^th September, 2023. Attendance is FREE to members of the public, but Eventbrite booking is required.  More details, the symposium programme and the booking link can be found here: https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/tedhughes/expressionism/symposium/.

Natalie Lucy talks about their project mapping the Caribbean Diaspora through the letters of Andrew Salkey. 

I am a PhD student at UCL. I started a part-time placement at the British Library in September which finished at the end of February. I was supervised by Eleanor Casson, who, until recently, was working on the Andrew Salkey archive and Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator. The aim of the project was to map the Caribbean diaspora through the correspondence of the writer, broadcaster and poet Andrew Salkey. Well-known both as a meticulous chronicler and a prolific correspondent, the many fascinating and frequently poignant, letters in Salkey’s extensive archive reflect a network of Caribbean writers and academics for whom Salkey served not only as something of a nexus but also as a facilitator in their careers. More importantly, though, the correspondence shows the movement of these writers within a wider context of the diaspora, a feature which we have visually presented through the digital applications, Gephi and Kepler.    

Why did I apply for this project?

My thesis explores the way that the trickster character, Anancy, has historically been reinvented, primarily at key political points, to say something about heritage and identity and how he emerges in the literature of British writers and artists, particularly those with Caribbean heritage. A significant part of my research concerns the ways that Anancy was appropriated in the writing of the Caribbean Arts Movement, a dynamic group of artists and writers formed in London in the mid-1960s. Andrew Salkey was one of the three founders of CAM, along with John La Rose and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. He had been in London since the early 1950s and had already demonstrated his potential influence as something of an ‘enabler’, both through his immense generosity towards his fellow writers and his connections both within the writing world and at the BBC. The project offered an exciting opportunity. Not only would I be able to access Andrew Salkey’s archive, which would undoubtedly enhance my research, but the project had the potential to explore the dynamics between the writers and to bring to life something of the networks, which were so key to the establishment of a literary and cultural foundation.

What are Gephi and Kepler?

Gephi is an open graph visualization platform. It has been used in a variety of projects, to illustrate both social networks, which are evidenced within correspondence, and historical patterns of movement.  In these projects, Gephi has been used as a way to make data more accessible and, by visually animating it, more engaging.

Static visualisation of the Caribbean Diasporic network found in Andrew Salkey’s correspondence files, using Gephi Visualisation Platform. Credit: CC-BY The British Library

Kepler is an open source geospatial analysis tool, which was originally created by Uber to map Uber drivers around the world. This offered a useful application through which to map the movement of the Caribbean writers in Salkey’s correspondence during key periods. 

Static visualisation of the movement of the Caribbean Diasporic network found in Andrew Salkey’s correspondence files using Kepler. Credit: CC-BY The British Library

Gathering the Data

The first stage of the project was to acquire the data that would ultimately be used in the visual map of the diaspora. Salkey was a meticulous archivist, retaining a significant quantity of the letters he received; he was also a diligent and attentive correspondent. Salkey’s friends were prominent Caribbean writers and publishers and Salkey’s archive contains the letters of Samuel Selvon, his distinctive language reminiscent of his groundbreaking novel The Lonely Londoners, George Lamming and Jan Carew.

A selection of letters from Sam Selvon to Andrew Salkey, Add MS 89377/7/54. Credit: CC-BY Samuel Selvon Estate

The initial data was limited to the date and location of the correspondence, information that could suggest the patterns of movement within the diaspora. The idea was that it would provide a framework with which to start to explore the potential of the project. 

The letters were so rich in detail, however, that other information was also recorded. I was able to note when correspondents mentioned other countries that they were planning to visit or when they spoke about other writers within the network. This provided an additional layer of information, which helped to broaden the analysis of the Caribbean diasporic network, linking people with each other as well as with Salkey.

Static visualisation of the Caribbean Diasporic network found in Andrew Salkey’s correspondence files with biographical information. Credit: CC-BY The British Library

One of the recurring themes of the letters was the evident impact that these writers had on each other, not only as a network through which to promote their work, but also to seek some form of solidarity. In numerous letters, Andrew Salkey is asked for advice or practical assistance. Sometimes this is a request for a review of their work, or a recommendation for a lecturing post, or his opinion on a piece of writing. Further clues are revealed by the fact that some of the letters also contain Salkey’s additional notes, handwritten in the margin or a penned tick beside a request.

What did I Learn?

In addition to the fascinating insight into the important work that the British Library does, I have discovered something about Andrew Salkey himself.  What evolve within the letters are essentially a series of stories of friendships, between remarkable writers and artists. Sometimes, the extent of appreciation for Salkey’s generosity in helping so many other writers and friends can also be glimpsed within the, frequently poetical, words on the page. Samuel Selvon’s letters to Salkey are habitually humorous, but occasionally he steps outside his mocking, affectionate style, and says something that is profoundly moving. In one letter to Salkey on 15 March 1975,  he writes: ‘you have a great gift, Andrew, so great, that even with those few words, and my inability to express myself as you do, you will understand and appreciate what I am trying to say. That is the quintessence of your genius - that behind the ballad and the episode that other human beings will laugh kiff-kiff at and enjoy you can see with the inner eye and analyse with the unique power that God gave you.'

A letter written by Sam Selvon to Andrew Salkey 15th March 1975, from Add MS 89377/7/54. Credit: CC-BY Samuel Selvon Estate

Natalie Lucy was a PhD placement at the British Library from September 2022 until February 2023. In this blog, Natalie explains her interest in the project, development of the project through the content of the correspondence, as well as what she learned from the placement. This blog is linked with another post on the Digital Scholarship Blog, which gives more detail on the digital visualisation applications used for this project.

Linked Blog:

Mapping Caribbean Diasporic Networks through the Correspondence of Andrew Salkey

In 2022, the British Library received a selection of rare books and manuscripts from the Honresfield Library, originally collected by industrialist William Law (1836–1901). This collection was purchased by the Friends of the National Libraries and shared across a number of UK institutions. The Honresfield Library contains several items of significant historical and literary importance.

The life and death of Jenny Wren, for the use of young ladies and gentlemen, Hon.129.(12) Many chapbooks were decorated with simple woodcuts, sometimes coloured, either by the seller or the owner.

Among the items that were allocated to the British Library are a collection of curiously small volumes in uniform brown watered silk bindings with green spine labels betraying their contents: “Chap Books”. This collection comprises of 764 individual pamphlets, bound together in seventy parts. The volumes are numbered on their spines, and suggest three distinct series: 1-48, 1-19, and four un-numbered. This division is reflected, and expounded, in the 1891 Sotheby sales catalogue listing them:

“48. Chap Books. A collection of numerous small popular work for children, with woodcuts arranged in 20 vol. uncut, v. y. – An extensive collection of chap-books, garlands, children’s books, &c. with woodcuts arranged in 49 vol. 12mo, uncut, v.y. – Manuscript catalogues of both series by W. Maskell. 70 vol.”[1]

Comparing the current British Library holdings with the 1891 catalogue entry reveals a few discrepancies. Notably, one volume is missing from each numbered series: neither no. 49 nor no. 20 feature in the present British Library holdings. Furthermore, the remaining four unnumbered volumes are not accounted for here. However, item 49 in the sales catalogue includes a further eight volumes of “Chap and Toy Books”, sold to Maggs, which may suggest the origin of these additional four volumes.

The Sotheby entry also mentions a manuscript catalogue, which is dated 1872 and survives in the present collection. It further introduces us to the original compiler of the collection, the Rev. William Maskell (1814?-1890). Maskell was a liturgical scholar and collector who was in the habit of building up collections of books and works of art and selling them to public institutions[2]. The British Museum Library acquired a large number of liturgical works from Maskell within his lifetime, with a major portion of his collection being sold to the Museum for £2,240 in 1847[3]. However, these chapbooks remained in Maskell’s private collection until his death in 1890 and were sold by Sotheby in the following year. Contemporary annotations in the sales catalogue suggest the volumes were purchased at auction by Bain (possibly the London booksellers James Bain) and were likely acquired by William Law not long after this.

Manuscript catalogue of chapbooks, children's books, garlands; &c. &c., Hon.112.(1) William Maskell kept a detailed manuscript catalogue of his chapbook collection. The catalogue is organised alphabetically, with entries relating to the numbers which can be found on the spines of the bound volumes. For each entry, Maskell provides the volume number, short title, format, place and year of publication (where available).

The sales catalogue also attests to the impressive scale of the collection: “so complete a collection of chap-books would occupy many years even if possible to procure them in the different towns of England and Scotland in which they were printed.” The collection represents examples of printing from 53 different towns and cities in England, Scotland and Ireland, spanning c.1770-1865. These imprints include the names of printers whose body of work is largely absent from research library catalogues.

The misfortunes of a bad boy, Hon.134.(5) Some chapmen, such as W. Davison of Alnwick, produced multiple series of popular tales to be collected. This printing of The misfortunes of a bad boy was no. 21 in a series of halfpenny chapbooks produced by Davison in the early 19th century.

The collection also varies enormously in the nature of its content. ‘Chapbook’ is an infamously slippery term used to describe abridgements, alphabets, ballads, cries, dreadfuls, fables, garlands, histories, rhymes, songsters and morals, among other things. Their physical appearance and cheap, sometimes crude, production are also defining marks. Chapbooks of this period were often illustrated with woodcut blocks, which were typically re-used across publications, sometimes even being shared by different printers[4]. The indeterminate status of the chapbook is well illustrated by the sheer variety of size, shape, theme, and tone of the pamphlets represented in Maskell’s collection. Most of the collection is in remarkably pristine condition, with only a small selection bearing markings of former owners[5]. Some volumes include pencil inscriptions, possibly by William Law, generally commenting on their contents. In addition, there is one chapbook titled, “A pleasant and delightful dialogue between honest John and loving Kate. Part the first.” (1791) which has been loosely inserted alongside a copy of the second part of the same story[6]. This title does not appear in the 1872 manuscript catalogue.

The wonderful advantages of drunkenness; to which is added, Protest against whisky, Hon.163.(11) Chapbooks were produced on various subjects, from popular children’s tales, to more serious moral works. This early 19th century Scottish chapbook was a pamphlet decrying the dangers of excessive drinking.

The Maskell collection provides a useful resource for study into the production of British and Irish chapbooks in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. It is also an interesting example of chapbooks being collected, rather than used, and provides the opportunity for further study of Maskell and Law as collectors of cheap printed materials. This collection complements substantial holdings of chapbooks and cheap print already in the British Library collections. The Maskell collection has been fully catalogued online and can be found within shelfmark range Hon.112.(1) - Hon.183.(14).

 

[1] Sotheby’s, Sales Catalogue for the Late William Maskell, 26 February 1891.

[2] de Ricci, S.M.R.R., English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts 1530-1930 and Their Marks of Ownership, 1930, p.143.

[3] Harris, P. R. “The development of the collections of the Department of Printed Books, 1846-1875.” The British Library Journal 10, no. 2 (1984): 114–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42554204.

[4] Dutta, A., Bergel, G., and Zisserman, A., ‘Visual Analysis of Chapbooks Printed in Scotland’. In The 6th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, (2021) 67–72.  https://doi.org/10.1145/3476887.3476893

[5] See Hon.119.(2), Hon.121.(8), Hon.124.(4), Hon.129.(5), Hon.129.(11), Hon.129.(12), Hon.138.(4), Hon.138.(5), Hon.140.(6) and Hon.169.(6).

[6] See Hon.156.(6).

This weekend, bells in towers up and down the country will be ringing to mark the Coronation of King Charles III. Since the Coronation was announced there has been a concerted effort, ‘the ‘Ring for the King’ campaign, aimed at recruiting new ringers to learn the fascinating and absorbing hobby of change ringing and join the celebrations.

The art of change-ringing – the ringing of tower bells in mathematical patterns known as methods – originated in 17th-century England and, although practised in other countries today, remains a primarily English phenomenon. As such, it is perhaps strange that it is so little reflected in English literature. While poets such as Tennyson in ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ or A.E. Housman in ‘On Bredon Hill’ no doubt had the sound of change-ringing in mind, their work does not evoke or describe its specific patterns, although George Butterworth’s musical setting of ‘On Bredon Hill’ does capture it to some extent. Bells are a regular theme in the poetry of John Betjeman, who comes closer to reflecting change-ringing specifically and in one poem, ‘Bristol’, even speaks of ‘the mathematic pattern of a plain course on the bells’. In his Collected Works the pattern is printed below the poem.

Bells Betjeman X.989-6365. Caption: ‘Bristol’, from John Betjeman’s Collected Poems. 3rd ed. (London, 1970) X.989/6365.

The most famous literary bells in fiction are probably those in Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novel, The Nine Tailors . Crime writers seem to have an affinity with ringing – it features in two of M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin books and an episode of the long running TV series Midsomer Murders – but Sayers’ novel captures it most (if not entirely) accurately, and ingeniously uses the pattern of a ringing method as the basis of a cipher that is a key to the mystery.

A recent British Library acquisition uses ringing methods in an equally ingenious and intriguing – though very different – way. The American author, poet and critic Randall Couch, like Sayers, was fascinated by this ‘tradition of algorithmic composition’ and the result was the unusual and beautiful book Peal (RF.2021.a.5), published in an edition of 300 copies by the Tipperary-based Coracle Press in 2017.

Couch uses the construction of various ringing methods to play with English syntax. The books starts with a ‘Cento’, a poem composed from other writers’ lines. The lines Couch uses, chosen from a wide range of literary, philosophical, musicological and scientific sources, almost all relate in some way to bells, numbers, pattern, syntax or melody. He then turns each line into a ringing method by moving the words as the bells move in the chosen method, creating juxtapositions that range from the poetical to the nonsensical. In keeping with the conventions of writing out ringing methods, the path of the last word in the original line, corresponding with the heaviest working bell in the method, is printed in blue, and the first word, corresponding to the lightest bell (the treble, which may follow a different pattern to the other bells) is printed in red.

Here’s a simple example, using the line ‘Every text is a cento’ from French linguist François Rastier’s Meaning and Textuality. The method is Plain Hunt on five bells, the same as the ‘plain course’ quoted in Betjeman’s ‘Bristol’, although Couch better follows convention by writing the rows out in horizontal rows rather than vertical columns.

Plain Hunt on Five Bells from Randall Couch’s Peal, (RF.2021.a.5). Image from PEAL by Randall Couch, published by Coracle Press, Copyright 2017 Randall Couch

For a work that plays with ideas of syntax and meaning, an obvious line for Couch’s cento is Noam Chomsky’s famous example of a grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical sentence, ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’. Couch turns this into a plain course of Grandsire Doubles ‘Grandsire’ is the name of the method, and ‘Doubles’ means it is being rung on five bells. (You can read more about how methods are named here.)

Grandsire Doubles from Randall Couch’s Peal. Image from PEAL by Randall Couch, published by Coracle Press, Copyright 2017 Randall Couch

While Plain Hunt and Grandsire are among the easiest methods and the first that ringers tend to learn, Couch also uses more complex ones which he says were ‘chosen with an eye to the associations created by juxtaposing their names with the corresponding opening lines.’ Here is a line from a work by the earliest writers on change-ringing, John Duckworth and Fabian Stedman, set to a course of London Delight Bob Triples.

London Delight from Randall Couch’s Peal. Image from PEAL by Randall Couch, published by Coracle Press, Copyright 2017 Randall Couch

Couch also includes the method that bears Stedman’s name with a quotation from Gertrude Stein, ‘Money is what words are.’ Among the less familiar methods he uses are Bobby Dazzler Little Alliance Major (to Alan Turing’s words ‘Machines take me by surprise with great frequency’), Titanic Triples (John Cage’s ‘Every something is an echo of nothing’) and some with deliberately amusing names such as Ursa Minor (poet John Cleveland’s ‘I like not tears in tune’).

Couch’s cento and its variations may not have the instantly catchy appeal of Tennyson’s, Housman’s or Betjeman’s poems, but they are a unique and fascinating reflection on the structures of both change-ringing methods and the English language itself, with a lasting appeal for anyone with an interest in either.