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Winston Churchill important TLS re: "Marlborough: His Life and Times"
Winston Churchill important TLS re: "Marlborough: His Life and Times"
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Description:

Churchill Winston

Single page TLS, 8" x 10" on stationery stock with letterhead address of Chartwell, Westerham, Kent. Dated "8th July 1936" and signed by Winston Churchill as "WC". Typed on recto with verso blank. Lengthy notes in red ink and underlining in text by a copy editor in blank left margin. Toning to outer edges, and an occasional small mark, else near fine with expected folds.

Winston Churchill writes to C.C. Wood, chief copy editor at George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd, relating to the publication of his monumental biography "Marlborough: His Life and Times", published in four parts between 1933-1938. This exceptionally rare letter signed by Churchill, and with several annotations in Wood's hand, relates to the editing of this extensive and highly researched book. The letter is shown in full below:

"Dear Mr. Wood,

With regard to the letters quoted in the text, I will finally decide about any cuts in these when the final slip-proofs leave me. As I am having one more re-print, I do not alter them now, neither do I deal with all your queries, 'spelling, capitals and punctuation'. I think the original letters now published for the first time had better be printed in their original form subject only to an occasional adjustment to make them read intelligently. All the other letters already published by various authors should be modernized upon a regular principle. Perhaps in sending me back this new re-print you will ask your readers to carry this out in pencil throughout.

"Yours Truly, WC".

Winston Churchill is one of the best-known, and some say one of the greatest, statesmen of the 20th century. Though he was born into a life of privilege, he dedicated himself to public service. His legacy is a complicated one–he was an idealist and a pragmatist; an orator and a soldier; an advocate of progressive social reforms and an unapologetic elitist; a defender of democracy as well as of Britain’s fading empire–but for many people in Great Britain and elsewhere, Winston Churchill is simply a hero.

The TLS, written just about the time the Nazi region came in power, but several years before the advent of WWII and becoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill tasked himself to write the biography of Marlborough, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who started his court service as a page during the reign of Charles II and ended it as Master-General of the Ordnance of the English army under George I. He served under five sovereigns, distinguished himself on the battlefield and as a diplomat, and was once even imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason. Handsome and charming— Lord Chesterfield described him as “irresistible to either man or woman”— Marlborough’s military strategy led the Duke of Wellington to say that he could “conceive nothing greater than Marlborough at the head of an English army.”

Future prime minister Winston Churchill, who was named after Marlborough’s father and was the nephew of the Eighth Duke of Marlborough, wrote this history of his famous ancestor to refute earlier criticisms of Marlborough by the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. “Though it was a commissioned work, Churchill would not have invested nearly a million words and ten years had it not had special significance for him. For he wrote about a man who was not only his ancestor, an invincible general, the first of what became the Spencer-Churchill dukes of Marlborough, and a maker of modern Britain, but also a supreme example of heroism in the two vocations which mainly interested Churchill and in which ultimate triumph seemed to have eluded him— politics and war making” (Wiedhorn, 110). “It may be his greatest book. To understand the Churchill of the Second World War, the majestic blending of his commanding English with historical precedent, one has to read "Marlborough." Only in its pages can one glean an understanding of the root of the speeches which inspired Britain to stand when she had little to stand with” (Langworth, 164). “The scholarship seems formidable, as in no other of his works. Picking his way through conflicting testimony and evaluations, Churchill, while leaning on William Coxe’s 1818 biography of the duke, carefully weighs each writer’s reliability. Yet the tone is not as detached as might be expected from an academic historian… Marlborough, with his broad European view and his apparent sense of Britain’s imperial destiny, is the fulcrum, and all the other characters, parties, and issues take their places accordingly… the literati hostile to Marlborough— Pope, Swift, Thackeray, Macaulay— are harshly expelled from the witness stand” (Wiedhorn, 113-114).

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