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- That we still know so much about the Honresfield Collection is owing, not only to A.J. Law himself, but to the Burns scholar who gained his confidence, Davidson Cook. On the face of it, Cook was an unlikely figure to get privileged access at Honresfield. He was not a professional scholar, and not university educated. Nonetheless, Cook did a quite remarkable job, not only for the Honresfield Burns manuscripts, but also for the other major Honresfield collections, of Walter Scott and of the Brontës. Cook himself wrote and published about all three collections, but equally importantly he contacted and networked with other researchers, helping them gain access to the Honresfield material and collaborating with them on the production of the facsimiles and editions that would provide scholarly access for the future.
- Solid information is also available about the fate of at least some of the Honresfield Brontë manuscripts. In March 1933, a group of them (though not the Emily Brontë “E.J.B.” poems manuscript) was auctioned at Hodgson’s, in London, listed as “The Property of a Collector” rather than with Law’s name attached (Alexander and Smith, 291; see also Book Prices Current, 1933, 119-121). In the early thirties, auction prices had fallen, and only about half of the items sold. In the 1940s, one scholar found their subsequent movements “already well-nigh untraceable” (Christian, p. 179), but some have since resurfaced, and a number of them were either bought for or subsequently donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, so remaining available (Rosenblum and White). Nonetheless, Christine Alexander concluded that for Brontë scholars the disappearance of the Law manuscripts remains a “major stumbling-block,” and reported that “repeated pleas” to Law descendants “have gone unanswered” (Alexander, Manuscripts, xviii-xix).
- Since the 1930s, not only successive Burns scholars, but those doing research on Emily Brontë or Walter Scott, have lamented the disappearance of the Law manuscripts from Honresfield. As the survey above indicates, the situation is not as bleak as it might seem, largely because of the remarkable work in the 1920s by Davidson Cook. But in fact there is published evidence that key portions of the Law collection survive and are still in family ownership. The 1995 Oxford edition of Emily Brontë’s poems had to rely for the Honresfield manuscript (the “E.J.B.” notebook) on the Shakespeare Head facsimile, along with photographs from the notebook in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth (Roper and Chitham, p. 14; and cf. Alexander and Smith, pp. 291, 315).
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