Description:

Churchill Winston

 

Winston Churchill Lengthy TLS to Publisher Regarding Marlborough: His Life and Times--his Ancestor's Biography

 

2pp typed letter inscribed by Winston Churchill (1874-1965), future British Prime Minister, as “Dear Mr. Harrap”, and signed by him as “Yours sincerely, Winston S. Churchill. The letter to Churchill's publisher was written at Chartwell, Churchill's home in Westerham, Kent, on July 13, 1933. With "Chartwell, Westerham, Kent" letterhead on watermarked cream stationery. Docketed at top, and with two diagonal lines running across the first page in green ink. Expected paper folds and scattered light foxing. The second page is currently adhered to the first via the upper left corner, and there is a rusted paper clip impression at left, else very good to near fine. 8" x 10".

 

In full, with unchanged spelling and punctuation:

 

"[in Churchill's hand] Dear Sir,

 

[typed] “I send you herewith (1) a list of illustrations, (2) those photographs not already send you yesterday. From these two sets you can make up a complete series according to my table. The arrangement is provisional and the captions which require further study will be supplied later. In all there are 38 illustrations. As you mentioned 32, I have therefore marked 6 with red crosses which can if desired be omitted. Pray let me know promptly.

 

I send you also 6 facsimiles, only one of which, the Camaret Bay Letter cannot be printed with the text. This letter requires special treatment. It never works to have a fold both ways i.e. with an angle in it. I have therefore been forced to cut the sheet so as to make two pages of equal length. This can be printed as simple fold-outs on the lines I have folded them which will be quite convenient to the reader and not get crumpled. A note will explain that the actual size of the document has thus been affected. This letter is vital to the text.

 

The numerals which are provisional as regards order will be convenient for reference in our correspondence. You might decide on technical grounds whether No. 8 the Deed of Annuity and No. 25 Marlborough’s letter to William of Orange should not be interleaved instead of being printed in the text. On the whole I should prefer them interleaved.

 

In addition to all these there are 13 maps and plans 3 of which fold out, 2 of them in two colours. All the rest make up in the text.

 

[in Churchill's hand] Yours sincerely,

 

Winston S. Churchill".

 

This correspondence related to the publication of Churchill's monumental biography Marlborough: His Life and Times. 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 leveled 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).

 

According to another scholar: “It may be his [Churchill's] 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).

 

John Churchill (1650-1722), the first Duke of Marlborough, 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.”

 

Charles Wood, who was copied on this correspondence, had first worked with Churchill on the Marlborough project. Wood was later hired full-time in 1948 to proofread Churchill’s massive multi-volume work-in-progress, The Second World War, joining Churchill’s literary staff of secretaries (who typed on silent typewriters as Churchill dictated), research assistants, and advisors. Wood became “an essential member of the team and no error escaped his eye” (Gilbert VIII: 344). “Slight and small, Wood was the same age as Churchill but did not smoke or drink. His main virtue…was ‘a ruthless eye for misprints and inconsistencies…A meticulous proofreader, Wood was pedantic and opinionated. This, as much as Churchill’s habitual parsimony, probably explains the reluctance to bring him on board. Even then, Churchill issued firm instructions about reducing, not increasing, the number of commas, identifying inconsistencies without arguing their merits, and certainly not going through original documents. But Wood was soon exceeding his brief in typically abrasive style…[Churchill once called] Wood ‘indefatigable, interminable, intolerable— but he was determined not to repeat the errors in The Gathering Storm. So… [Wood] became a fixed if fractious member of Churchill’s team… [The work was] subjected to the green pen of Mr. Wood— a process that became known as ‘Wooding'” (Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, 149-150, 153).

This letter brilliantly highlights Churchill’s meticulousness as a writer. The mighty "British Bulldog" evaluated not as a stateman, but as an author, historian and biographer!

 

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

 

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