The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: Volume Three 1852-1855 ed Margaret Smith
A sorry tale of deceit, corruption and literary con men
By Mark Bostridge
At the centre of it lies Ellen Nussey's disastrous decision to entrust her valuable cache of Charlotte's letters to the literary forger T J Wise. Ellen was a schoolgirl friend of Charlotte's from their days at Roe Head, and possessed the largest collection of her correspondence: 394 letters received from Charlotte over more than two decades.
Ellen had already prepared a private edition of the letters she owned in the late 1880s, but had got cold feet about the project and then destroyed practically all the sets of 30,000 printed sheets in a huge bonfire over many weeks, assisted by the minister of her local church. This left her as easy prey for Wise and his front man, the biographer and critic-about-town Clement Shorter. Together they extracted the originals from her for £125 and the promise that they would be preserved in the South Kensington Museum "to enhance the honour & reputation of their gloriously gifted writer". In fact, within a couple of years it became evident that Wise was selling the manuscripts piecemeal at auction.
With Charlotte's letters scattered to the four winds, and often untraceable, an authoritative edition of all the surviving correspondence became, as the years passed, increasingly unlikely. Margaret Smith, therefore, deserves the highest praise for the sheer doggedness with which she has pursued bits and pieces of letters through salerooms and private collections (most strikingly, she pieced together one letter, cut up for autograph hunters, from scraps in five separate locations). She is also a model editor. The standard of her annotations is superb, and no worthwhile cross-reference to the Brontës' lives or works is allowed to slip through her net. Read miore: arlindo-correia/bronte
Together they extracted the originals from her for £125 and the promise that they would be preserved in the South Kensington Museum "to enhance the honor & reputation of their gloriously gifted writer".
BeantwoordenVerwijderenThey promised Arthur Bell Nicholls the same thing
In fact, within a couple of years it became evident that Wise was selling the manuscripts piecemeal at auction.
The problem was both Ellen and Arthur were getting too old to care for their Bronte legacies. The physical letters in Ellen's case and the little books and copyright in Arthur's case ...the good news is by this time the value of Bronte material was well established and even if it were sold off, it would be valued and not disappear altogether as it would if let go earlier . It would be hard to find, but not imposable as Margaret Smith proved...and much of it returned to the Parsonage eventually
The Bronte enthusiast owes Prof Margaret Smith a very great deal. It's actually incalculable, Prof. Smith has devoted a lifetime to her efforts on behalf of CB's letters ... on top of everything else her footnotes are a joy to read