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I
On 27 June 1965, The Sunday Telegraph carried an interview with Mr. Harold Macmillan, then chairman of the firm, announcing that the firm's archives would be sold piecemeal at auction in a sale "of a kind to warm the cockles of American bibliographical hearts" (Nowell-Smith, Copyright, p. 105). The interview mentioned that Mr. Simon Nowell-Smith had been commissioned to prepare the archives for sale at Sotheby's. Unhappy that so important a documentary record of nineteenth-century publishing should be broken up, Mr. Nowell-Smith sought unsuccessfully to persuade Macmillan's to give or sell the complete archive to the British Museum, and to persuade the Museum to approach Macmillan's. Failing this, he accepted the commission, and Mr. John Carter of Sotheby's, having previously made a rough list of materials in Macmillan's basement, provided the general
The obvious reason behind the sale of the archive was Macmillan's abandonment of their premises in St. Martin's Street, which they had occupied since 1897, for more spacious and modern warehouse accommodation in the country, near Basingstoke. With an assistant, Mr. Nowell-Smith began to work his way through the more than half million letters in the archive. The material was roughly organized into 400-500 chronological boxfiles, "mostly falling to pieces," of letters arranged alphabetically from authors, agents, and the general public, to 1950 and beyond; the other side of this correspondence, consisting of some 130,000 copyletters in about 450 bound volumes, to 1939; some sixty copy-letter volumes and boxfiles containing letters to printers and binders, 1892-1923; readers' reports copied into forty-six notebooks, 1866-1912,[8] and sixteen bound volumes of autograph reports by individual readers and on related subjects;[9] twenty-two "editions books," between 1892-1930; twenty-seven volumes of "Records of Manuscripts" with indexes; nine volumes of "Agenda Books," 1931-1937, which record decisions whether or not to publish; a contributors' index to Macmillan's Magazine;[10] some haphazardly accumulated proofs of books by Yeats, Kipling, Edith Sitwell, and other authors; a sizeable correspondence of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan with author-friends, mounted in albums; family correspondence and letters between the Macmillans on business matters; a vast quantity of letters, mainly nineteenth-century, between Macmillan's New York and Macmillan's London, with copies of replies, bound in volumes;[11] and, finally, a miscellaneous collection of legal and other documents concerning partnership agreements, building leases, action concerning violations of copyright, and the like.
Since the object of the sorting, it will be remembered, was to segregate letters of authors of some renown into attractive lots for sale by auction,
Most prominent among missing papers in the archive are the letters by Tennyson and Lewis Carroll. A frequent contributor to Macmillan's Magazine, Tennyson did not publish books with Macmillan until 1884. By this date, most of his correspondence was conducted by his son, Hallam, from whom there are many letters in the files. Since we know that Alexander Macmillan was so staunch a Tennyson admirer that he thought originally to entitle Macmillan's Magazine, "The Round Table," and since there are in the archive "copies of many long and lively letters from the publisher to the poet laureate" (SN-S: Notes), a reciprocal side to this correspondence must at one time have existed. That the letters may have been destroyed piecemeal according to destruction schedules, previous to the packing up of the journal in 1907, is suggested by the fact that although letters to the Laureate appear in both the privately printed Letters of Alexander Macmillan (1908) and Graves's Life and Letters (1910), none from the poet are included in either volume. Another explanation has been suggested in the TLS review of Mr. Nowell-Smith's Letters to Macmillan, namely that the letters were lent to Hallam Tennyson for the preparation of his Memoir of his father and never returned. If so, they should be among the papers and manuscripts at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln, but Professor Cecil Lang, one of the editors of Tennyson's letters, informs me that he is unaware of any surviving collection of letters to Macmillan.[12] Less mystification surrounds the Lewis Carroll letters, which were sold to the Rosenbach Foundation in 1957, the single instance known to me of such a transaction.
Some letters had already been segregated for various scholars, but according to Mr. Nowell-Smith, the searching had been very unsystematic. For example, the late Professor Lona Mosk Packer was not shown all the
Through a more conservative interpretation of his mandate to segregate and destroy, Mr. Nowell-Smith managed to forestall the mutilation of the archive that would have been the inevitable result of following literally his original instructions. A large number of authors of lesser calibre was salvaged by grouping them together under such headings as "miscellaneous poets and novelists," "economists," "statesmen and soldiers," "musicians," etc., and these lots were eventually accepted as suitable for the Sotheby sale. Other letters were grouped under "copyright, net book agreement, The Times book war," and would, had the sale been conducted, have gone to Bodley (SN-S: Notes). Approaches were made to the directors of Macmillan's by Mr. D. T. Richnell, then the Librarian of Reading University, to present the residue of letters surviving after the sorting of major authors to the Reading University Library. "His feeling was," writes the Archivist of the Library, Mr. J. A. Edwards, "that even if all the literary items had been removed, the collection would still possess interest for students of publishing history, copyright and the book trade."[13] In November 1965, Mr. Nowell-Smith "obtained authority to hand over to Reading University 'residual material . . . on the basis that none of it (or any information derived from it) should be published in any form or sold or otherwise disposed of (except by destruction)' . . . without Macmillan's consent" (SN-S: Notes). The amount of material from the archive that was actually destroyed under the option exercised by Mr. Nowell-Smith was thus minimal, and in the main it consisted of certain runs of copyletters, such as those to travellers and agents, which existed in a dozen or more duplicates, and abstracts of publishing information that was more fully set out in other documents.
By February 1966, the letters intended for the sale had been extracted and placed in author packets, and the residual collection, consisting of tens of thousands of letters, passed to Reading. The letters grouped for sale lots included the correspondence of about two thousand authors and others in addition to the groups of readers' reports, printers' and binders' correspondence, family papers, manuscript registers, and proofs, already detailed. At this state, presumably, the truncated archive was ready to be catalogued and described and assembled into lots for the projected sale. That some of the extracted material was ultimately deemed unsuitable for the sale
In June 1966, Macmillan's offered to the British Museum their general copyletter file from c. 1855 to 1939, together with a few other items. In August, the Museum, which had thus far displayed little interest in the archive, declined the offer but indicated that it would be interested in the complete archive, which by this time, of course, no longer existed. Macmillan's replied that it was too late to reverse their decision to sell the collection at auction. Through the combined efforts of Macmillan's and Sotheby's, negotiations continued with the Museum, and in the fall of 1967 the extracted author packets and other archive material were sold to the Museum and "passed into the keeping of the Department of Manuscripts," which has now bound the collection into volumes and produced an index file of the more then two-thousand authors represented.
Thus the story to date, with one exception. Save for the Lewis Carroll letters in the Rosenbach Foundation, certain marginal material which was destroyed, and documents and letters (mainly post 1939) retained by Macmillan's, the papers sorted at Basingstoke have now passed to the libraries of the University of Reading and the British Museum. This account does not, however, include a large cache of letters, originally a part of the archive, now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Acquired in 1967, the vast bulk of the Berg collection consists of letters from Victorian theologians, though it also contains important literary names, including the Kingsleys, Thomas Hughes, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Morris, Allingham, Patmore and Palgrave. Significantly, the letters in the Berg Macmillan collection were not among the letter-files entrusted to Mr. Nowell-Smith, though the Berg has the originals of a series of Thomas Hughes letters which exist only in typescript copies in the archives now in the British Museum. The provenance of these letters is not at this time available, but the narrowness of their range — most of them date between 1852-1863 — suggests that they may have been segregated for some purpose a good many years ago, perhaps for
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