National Library of Australia - Home page
NLA News - home March 2002 Volume XII Number 6
Eavesdropping on the Past

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Left and below)
Letter from Sir Joseph Banks to Count Antonio Rolim Viceroy of Brazil, 17 November 1768
Papers of Sir Joseph Banks; Manuscript Section MS 9/2b

Letter from Sir Joseph Banks to Count Antonio Rolim Viceroy of Brazil, 17 November 1768

Edward Duyker explores letters in the National Library—in both manuscript and printed form—and tells of his own experiences in tracking down and handling original correspondence

Jane Austen believed that ‘the true art of letter-writing … is to express on paper what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.’ She declared this to her sister Cassandra in January 1801 in a letter which can be found in facsimile in the National Library and added: ‘I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.’ No doubt she would have agreed with the poet John Donne who, in one of his verse letters to Sir Henry Wotton, declared:

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; For thus friends absent speak

Letter from Sir Joseph Banks to Count Antonio Rolim Viceroy of Brazil, 17 November 1768

A very significant proportion of the National Library’s manuscript holdings consists of letters. They enable us to eavesdrop on the ‘conversations’ of long-dead Australians. In the collection one can find letters by Edmund Barton, Martin Boyd, Ben Chifley, Alfred Deakin, Peter Lalor, Alan Marshall, Samuel Marsden, Nellie Melba, John Monash, Ferdinand von Mueller, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Henry Parkes, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Henry Handel Richardson, Kenneth Slessor, Arthur Streeton, Patrick White and Gough Whitlam, to name just a few. Also preserved are letters by individuals with important associations with Australia, such as Joseph Banks, William Bligh, James Cook, John Franklin, John Hunter, Ludwig Leichhardt, Lachlan Macquarie and Thomas Mitchell. The list is continually being added to. I have circled the globe a number of times in search of original letters to or from various biographical subjects and in the process generated much new correspondence of my own. Some years ago, I also co-edited the correspondence of the great Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander who accompanied Cook and Banks on the Endeavour. Unfortunately my co-editor, Per Tingbrand, suffered a devastating cerebral haemorrhage in 1991 and the detective chase was made more difficult as a result. Although Per’s phenomenal gift for languages was unaffected, he was left with epilepsy and memory loss. One of the matters to slip through the net of memory was the location of a letter written by the Quaker naturalist Peter Collinson to Solander, in October 1767. Per had noted the existence of this letter in a working calendar of correspondence, but he simply could not remember where it was held. Shortly before we were obliged to hand our manuscript to Melbourne University Press, he suddenly remembered that it was among Benjamin Franklin’s papers in the American Philosophical Society’s collection in Philadelphia. Keen to offer our readers a comprehensive collection of Solander’s correspondence, I sent an urgent fax to Philadelphia explaining our project and our looming deadline, but was very disappointed to learn that the original letter could not be found. Then the librarian remembered that there was a photostat, dating from the 1950s, in the Franklin Collection at Yale University Library. It is hard for me to describe the pleasure and relief I felt on receiving that eighteenth-century letter from Yale the following morning. It is not often that you receive a fax from someone who has been dead for nearly 230 years, telling you that Benjamin Franklin is coming for the weekend!

Many of Solander’s letters to Sir Joseph Banks were preserved among Banks’ papers. These were dispersed by Banks’ heirs at a sale in 1886. Consequently, Banksian correspondence can now be found in libraries as far afield as the United States, Australia (including the National Library) and New Zealand, in addition to the British Library and the British Museum (Natural History). Several individuals, however, have made the location of these letters a great deal easier than might otherwise have been the case. Between 1833 and 1845 many of Joseph Banks’ letters, including some of Solander’s, were transcribed by Mary and Hannah Turner, daughters of Dawson Turner (1775–1858), who had accepted the challenge of writing a biography of Banks. Turner never wrote the biography for which he was commissioned, but his daughters produced 23 bound volumes containing transcriptions of over 2000 letters and documents in chronological order. These volumes are now held in the Botany Library of the British Museum (Natural History). In 1958, Warren Dawson (1888–1968), using the 23 volumes of Dawson Turner transcripts as a primary source, published a pioneering index. More recently, H.B. Carter, the Australian-born Director of the Banks Archive Project at the British Museum (Natural History), assisted by Julia Bruce and later Neil Chambers, began the enormous task of ‘recreating’ Banks’ correspondence (about 11 000 letters) as a coherent whole by collating transcriptions from repositories worldwide. The computerised index of the Banks Archives Project was a valuable aid in Per’s and my assembly of Solander’s correspondence. Indeed it was like a map for buried treasure.

[Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Daniel Solander and one other]  [1771?]

 

 

 

John Mortimer Hamilton, 1741–1779
[Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Daniel Solander and one other]  [1771?]
oil on canvas; 120 x 166 cm
Pictorial Collection R10630

Aside from Solander’s letters, I have handled thousands of original letters written by convicts, merchants, explorers, philosophers, scientists, novelists, governors, admirals, generals, kings, rajahs and prime ministers. I still get excited at the thought that someone I admire, or know the fate of, once held and wrote upon the paper I am holding. I need little convincing that the handwriting in a letter can reveal significant details about a biographical subject or, in the case of an unknown correspondent, health, age, education and nationality. One can sometimes ‘see’ the very nervousness of a man writing to his superior about a sensitive matter and watch an uncertain hand firm and give way to confidence. I am more cautious with regard to discerning personality traits, but I believe the pompous and egotistical are often betrayed by their handwriting. Some have made a very serious study of this subject. It was a Frenchman, the Abbé Jean Hyppolyte Michon (1806–81), who first coined the term ‘graphology’. In the course of many years of study he compared the handwritten letters of thousands of individuals whose personalities were familiar to him. From 1872 onwards, with the aid of his collaborators Delestre and Debarolle, he began to publish the results of his research. He was followed by his famous student, Jules Crépieu-Jamin, and by disciples in other European countries. In fact, in Germany in the 1890s, two periodicals devoted to handwriting analysis were established, one edited by Wilhelm Lagenbruch, the other by Hans Busse. And in the twentieth century whole theoretical systems of graphology evolved on the basis of clinical psychology.

While the interpretation of handwriting would seem to be highly subjective, the transcription of correspondence is also fraught with problems and can lead to significant errors. The omission of a single punctuation mark, for example, can alter the whole sense of a letter. A good example of this is an incident which took place 130 years ago on my mother’s native island of Mauritius. At the time the Franco-Prussian War was raging. Although the island had been a British colony for 60 years, many Mauritians still saw France as the mother country and were eager for any news of events on the battlefield as Prussian troops massed on the Meuse River. In early September 1870, a telegram arrived provoking wild jubilation in the streets of Port Louis. It stated very simply: French defeated Prussians at Sedan. In fact, the Prussians had encircled Sedan and, after a fierce bombardment, had taken 83 000 prisoners (including the Emperor Napoleon III). The road to Paris lay open and the Second Empire collapsed three days later. Unfortunately, a clerk had forgotten the vital full stop in the telegram to Mauritius. The message should have read: French defeated. Prussians at Sedan. When the truth was realised, the island was plunged into melancholy made all the worse by the previous celebrations.

As this incident demonstrates, letters are among the raw materials of history for they offer a means whereby basic facts from the past are accessible in the present. Yet such documents are simply rootless facts of change without the historian’s mind. Increasingly, librarians and archivists would prefer to see digital storage and access of original documents in their collections through online facilities. Although such access is to be applauded, there remains a need for specialised research by historians familiar with the language, handwriting, milieu, concerns and correspondents of a particular historical figure. When letters are dispersed or are in another language, the historian has an even more important integrative role to play as a detective, transcriber, translator and explanatory editor.

A Thundering Victory’—(facsimile of Puccini’s letter dated November 5th, 1918)

 

 

 

‘A Thundering Victory’—(facsimile of Puccini’s letter dated November 5th, 1918) from Puccini among Friends by Vincent Seligman (London: Macmillan, 1938)

The Library holds the published correspondence of hundreds of famous historical figures. Not surprisingly, writers are particularly well represented and include: Jane Austen, Balzac, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Clare, Conrad, Cowper, Dickens, Dickinson, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Gide, Gray, Hawthorne, Hazlitt, Hesse, Lear, Longfellow, Mann, Mansfield, Mauriac, Meredith, O’Neil, Poe, Pope, Pound, Rilke, Shelley, Stendhal, Stevenson, Swift, Twain and Wordsworth. There are also numerous collections of letters by composers such as Berlioz, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Mozart, Puccini, Vaughan Williams and Wagner. As one would expect, the correspondence of political leaders also figures strongly and includes those of Ben Gurion, Willy Brandt, Churchill, Cromwell, Disraeli, Indira Gandhi, Lloyd George, Gramsci, Lincoln, Marx, Napoleon, Nehru, Daniel O’Connell, Thomas Paine, Henry Parkes, William Pitt, Roosevelt, Walpole and Wilberforce. Among the thinkers whose published correspondence can be found in the collection are Darwin, Einstein, Huxley, Leibniz, Spinoza and Voltaire. And there are other surprises, too, including the correspondence of Christopher Columbus, General Custer, Lt Newton Fowell (of the First Fleet flagship Sirius), Galawdewos (Emperor of Ethiopia, 1540–1559), Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), T.E. Lawrence, Governor Phillip, Pliny the Younger and Sir Walter Raleigh. Not so suprisingly, there are numerous editions of the letters of Saint Paul. Most of the collections of published correspondence in the National Library are posthumously edited, but some were published during the particular writer’s own lifetime. This is a brave act. As the American novelist E.B. White observed: ‘A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist—nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin.’ Such letters can, of course, be a literary device, as in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) or Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). 

The advent of the Internet and the widespread use of email have not only altered styles of written correspondence, but they have also thrown up new challenges for future scholars. The majority of emails are unlikely ever to be printed on paper. Unless they are digitally stored with an identifiable software ‘envelope’, future archivists may have great difficulty even recognising them. The abbreviations used in some email addresses may also lead to special challenges for historians in the identification of letter writers and recipients. Yet in many respects these are age-old problems in new clothes: only a fraction of our documentary heritage has ever been preserved and we rely on the wisdom of a small minority to recognise the historical potential of particular records. In a very real sense librarians and curators, as well as discriminating collectors and donors, become cultural heroes. But we can all do our bit to ensure the preservation of what may be significant for the future by cultivating a respect for documents. One only has to consider the ill-advised actions of the widows of James Cook, Matthew Flinders and Sir Richard Burton (who destroyed much of their respective husband’s correspondence), to begin to imagine what treasures have been lost to posterity.

DR EDWARD DUYKER is a Sydney historian. His most recent book (with his mother Maryse Duyker) is the first English translation of Bruny d’Entrecasteaux’s journal: Voyage to Australia and the Pacific 1791–1793

Back to NLA News Index Back to March Issue Back to NLA Home Page
NLA News - home

To order a particular issue of the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.