̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - letters

Last letter of Captain Scott finally revealed in full - 101 years on

sjr81 — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:01:01 +0000

Written by Scott from his final Antarctic camp at the very end of his life in March 1912, the letter to Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman speaks poignantly of Scott’s anxiety for his family and his hope that he and companions have set a good example. ̽��ֱ��acquisition of this letter is of considerable importance for the United Kingdom’s polar heritage.

It is being revealed to the public 101 years to the day since Captain Scott’s final diary entry (March 29, 1912).

Though previously quoted in part, its full contents have remained unknown to the wider public until today, having passed into private hands following delivery to Bridgeman

It will now take its place at SPRI alongside the other ‘last letters’ written to his widow Kathleen Scott, Mrs Oriana Wilson, Mrs Emily Bowers, Sir Reginald Smith and George Egerton. ̽��ֱ��only other last letter in private hands, written to Edgar Speyer, was sold last year at auction for £165,000.

Scott is known to have written to his friend, the author JM Barrie, but the whereabouts of this letter are completely unknown.

SPRI Archivist, Naomi Boneham said: “It seems very fitting that we should be able to announce this major acquisition exactly one hundred and one years after Scott’s final diary entry. We intend to put the letter on public display in the Polar Museum as soon as it has been conserved.”

Admiral Sir Francis Charles Bridgeman Bridgeman GCB, GCVO (7 December 1848 – 17 February 1929) was a Royal Navy officer. As a Captain he commanded a battleship and then an armoured cruiser and then, after serving as second-in-command of three different fleets, he twice undertook tours as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet with a stint as Second Sea Lord in between those tours. He became First Sea Lord in November 1911. He had been Scott's Commanding Officer.

Thanks to donations from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the John R Murray Trust, the Friends of the National Libraries and Dr Richard Dehmel, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has been able to make the purchase for the sum of £78,816. ̽��ֱ��letter was sold by Lord and Lady Graham, descendants of Sir Francis Bridgeman.

̽��ֱ��Institute was delighted to be offered the opportunity to acquire Scott’s letter to Bridgeman, along with associated correspondence, as the majority of the surviving letters are already held in the collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute and are publicly accessible via its Polar Museum. They are among the museum’s greatest treasures.

SPRI’s Librarian & Keeper of Collections, Heather Lane, said: “Without the generous support of these organisations and individuals we would not have been able to secure this important manuscript. It is extraordinary to think that the letter will now be reunited with the others written by Scott in the Antarctic over 100 years ago.”

̽��ֱ��final letters written in March 1912 from the Antarctic to family and friends by Captain Scott and his companions, Dr Edward Wilson, Captain Lawrence Oates and Lt. Henry Robertson Bowers, are of major significance to the national heritage. No letters are known to survive from P.O. Edgar Evans, the fifth member of the Polar Party. In the case of Scott, this letter clearly expresses his feelings as he lay dying and is a testament to the qualities of endurance which propelled Scott to the status of a national hero.

We know much about the expedition from Scott’s personal journal, which was bequeathed to the nation and is held by the British Library, which kindly lent the final volume for a temporary exhibition at the Polar Museum in 2012 to mark the centenary of Scott’s achievement of the South Pole. As the extract below illustrates, the Bridgeman letter is an important addition to the story as it conveys Scott’s feelings at the very end of his life. It has never been reproduced in full in any of the editions of Scott’s writings.

Its purchase enables this letter to be reunited with the others written from the tent on the Great Ice Barrier, already in the Institute’s care, and with the photographs, sledging journals and personal diaries of Scott and his team, which form the most comprehensive record of the expedition held anywhere.

SPRI is the oldest international centre for polar research and is world-renowned for research and reference in a variety of fields relating to the environment, history, science and social science of the polar regions. ̽��ֱ��Institute was founded in Cambridge, as a memorial Scott and his four companions, who died returning from the South Pole in 1912. As well as research programmes, the Institute provides access to its library, archives and museum for the general public and has a strong educational outreach programme on the Arctic and Antarctic, ice and environmental change. It houses the largest public collection of historic archives, photographs and artefacts from polar expeditions in the United Kingdom.

Text of the letter:

To Sir Francis Bridgeman

My Dear Sir Francis
I fear we have shipped up – a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first. Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

Good-bye and good-bye to dear Lady Bridgeman

Yours ever

R. Scott

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

A letter written by the dying Captain Scott - one of only two remaining in private hands - can be revealed in full for the first time after being acquired by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first.

Captain Scott

Scott Polar Research Institute

Captain Scott writing in his Antarctic hut, before the expedition that cost him his life

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Yes

Ever your affectionate Father, Charles Dickens

ns480 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:18:52 +0000

There are pivotal moments in family life when parents feel compelled to pick up a pen and share their wisdom with their children. It must have been just such an occasion when the author Charles Dickens, who was born 200 years ago today, sat down in a Liverpool hotel to write to his son Henry, who had newly arrived at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study mathematics.

Henry Fielding Dickens, who was born in January 1849, was the eighth of the ten children born to the author and his wife Catherine. He was named after one of the 18^th-century writers whom Charles most admired – Henry Fielding, a humane and perceptive magistrate as well as the author of Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) – and Henry Dickens was to follow his namesake into a successful career in the law.

̽��ֱ��letter that Charles wrote to Henry (My Dear Harry) in October 1868 was given to Trinity Hall in the 1950s by a great-great grandson of the author. It is held in the college’s Old Library.

In the present context of austerity and student debt, Charles’s letter makes fascinating reading. It begins with a list of practical matters relating to Henry’s allowance (£250 a year – “handsome for all your wants”), his requirements for furniture and clothing (“I strongly recommend you to buy nothing in Cambridge”) and the copious bottles of wine to be sent from London in order that the young undergraduate should enjoy life.

Charles tells his 19-year-old son that he has ordered by the same post “3: Doz Sherry, 2:Doz port and 3:Doz: light claret to be sent down to you”. A footnote adds “* and 6 bottles of brandy”, considerably upping the quota of alcohol. Having given the details of this generous supply, Charles then exhorts Henry to be prudent in his handling of money. “Now observe attentively,” he urges. “We must have no shadow of debt.”

Henry was the first in his family to study at university – and the decision to send him to Cambridge wasn’t taken lightly. As Claire Tomalin describes in her acclaimed biography (Charles Dickens, 2011), Charles had planned for Henry to take the Indian civil service examination – but the boy announced that he wanted to study at Cambridge. Not wishing his funds to be wasted, Charles consulted the headmaster of Henry’s school who advised him that his pupil was able. Henry was allowed to study for a further three years, and had private tutors in a number of skills, including mathematics and fencing.

Charles was keen to see rewards from his investment in his son and the letter is telling on this front: he reminds his son that he is benefitting from advantages in life that his father never had. “You know how hard I work for what I get, and I think you know that I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child,” he writes. Charles softens this expectation by instructing Henry to confide in his father: “If you ever find yourself on the verge of perplexity or difficulty, come to me. You will never find me hard with you while you are manly and truthful.”

Debt, and the importance of good accounting, is mentioned several times (a reminder of the prominence of ‘indebtedness’ as a theme of Charles’s fictional writing: on the one hand, the metaphor of ‘credit’ serves to illustrate important ways in which human lives are inextricably interrelated; on the other hand, Charles is always quick to suggest that while we should feel gratitude for what we ‘owe’ to others, we must remain fiscally independent and responsible). In the 19^th century debtors were imprisoned until they could pay off their debts (and the prison fees), and Charles’s own childhood experiences were formative: he had seen his father John falling into debt (he owed £40 10s). When he failed to repay it, he was taken to Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark.

Charles was sent to the pawnbroker’s with the family books and much of their furniture: even more significantly for a sensitive child, he was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory at around the age of 12, and for the rest of his adult life he regretted that his family had apparently been prepared to sacrifice his education – and indeed the happiness of his childhood – for their temporary economic survival. In an autobiographical fragment published in his friend John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (1872-4), Charles sighed “I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber, or a little vagabond”. More poignantly, Charles recalled that his parents did not feel for his disappointment: “My father and mother were quite satisfied […] They could hardly have been more so, if I had been 20 years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.”

But Charles rescued himself from a possible life of penury and crime by the tireless efforts of his own labour. His Christian faith survived, too, and the letter to Henry speaks of the “priceless value of the New Testament” as “the one unfailing guide in Life”. Thanks to the brilliant productions of Charles’s prodigious genius, his own children were to enjoy a very different – and much more stable – childhood. As if fulfilling the alternative career that his father had imagined for himself, Henry, in particular, did well at Cambridge. After a year, he was awarded one of the principal scholarships at Trinity Hall, worth £50 a year.

In a memoir, Henry described telling his father about the award at Higham railway station in Kent. “He said ‘Capital, capital’ – nothing more.” Henry felt disappointed but in the pony carriage on the way to Gad’s Hill, the family home, his father broke down. “Turning towards me with tears in his eyes and giving me a warm grip of the hand, he said, ‘God bless you, my boy; God bless you!’ That pressure of the hand I can feel now as distinctly as I felt then, and it will remain as strong and real as the day of my death.”

Sadly, Charles died in 1870 (aged only 58) and he did not see his son’s subsequent success – but he would have been proud. After graduating with a good degree in mathematics in 1872, Henry was called to the Bar: after 20 years of successful advocacy in the Common Law Courts, Henry became Common Serjeant of London (a senior judicial appointment at the Old Bailey that he held until 1932). While his father’s fiction had engaged rather combatively with the work of the legal profession, regularly criticising the etiquette and ethics of the then newly-professionalised criminal Bar, Henry by all accounts excelled in his chosen vocation.

̽��ֱ��letter from Charles to Henry is dated 15 October, 1868, and the address at the top is the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. It was given to Trinity Hall by Christopher Dickens, one of Henry’s grandchildren, who was a student at Trinity Hall, matriculating in 1957.

̽��ֱ��time that Henry spent at Trinity Hall is just one of several strong connections between Charles Dickens and the college. Graham Storey (1921-2005), the editor of the ten volumes of the Pilgrim Edition of ̽��ֱ��Letters of Charles Dickens (1965-98), read law at Trinity Hall before becoming a Fellow in English in 1949. Generations of Dickens scholars have subsequently been indebted to his scholarship. Both the College’s current Fellows in English, Alison Hennegan and Dr Jan-Melissa Schramm, teach and publish on Dickens’s work. Trinity Hall has historically been known in Cambridge as ‘the lawyers’ College’, and like Graham Storey, Dr Schramm read law as an undergraduate. She has written on Dickens’s engagement with legal evidence and rhetoric in two books for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press: the second of these, Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative, will appear in June 2012 as part of the wider scholarly programme to commemorate the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth.

A letter written in 1868 by Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth falls today, to his son Henry, who had newly arrived at Cambridge, reveals a touching concern for Henry’s welfare in matters physical, moral and spiritual.

If you ever find yourself on the verge of perplexity or difficulty, come to me. You will never find me hard with you while you are manly and truthful.

Charles Dickens to his son Henry, 1868

Trinity Hall

Dickens letter

Full transcript of Charles Dickens' letter to his son Henry, 1868

Adelphi Hotel Liverpool

Thursday Fifteenth October 1868

My Dear Harry,

I have your letter here this morning. I enclose you another cheque for £25, and I write to London by this post, ordering 3 Doz: Sherry, 2 Doz: Port, and 3 Doz: light claret to be sent down to you*. I also enclose a cheque in favour of the Rev: F.L. Hopkins for £5..10..0.

Now, observe attentively. We must have no shadow of debt. Square up everything whatsoever that it has been necessary to buy. Let not a farthing be outstanding on any account, when we begin together with your allowance. Be particular in the minutest detail.

I wish to have no secret from you in the relations we are to establish together, and I therefore send you Joe Chitty’s letter bodily. Reading it, you will know exactly what I know, and will understand that I treat you with perfect confidence. It appears to me that an allowance of £250 a year will be handsome for all your wants, if I send you your wine. I mean this to include your tailor’s bills as well as every other expence; and I strongly recommend you to buy nothing in Cambridge, and to take credit for nothing but the clothes with which your tailor provides you. As soon as you have got your furniture accounts in, let us wipe all these preliminary expenses clean out, and I will then send you your first quarter. We will count in it, October, November, and December; and your second quarter will begin with the New Year. If you dislike, at first, taking charge of so large a sum as £62..10..0 you can have your money from me half quarterly.

You know how hard I work for what I get, and I think you know that I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child. You know that you are one of many heavy charges on me, and that I trust to your so exercising your abilities and improving the advantages of your past expensive education, as soon to diminish this charge. I say no more on that head.

Whatever you do, above all other things keep out of debt, and confide in me. If you ever find yourself on the verge of any perplexity or difficulty, come to me. You will never find me hard with you while you are manly and truthful.

As your brothers have gone away one by one, I have written to each of them what I am now going to write to you. You know that you have never been hampered with religious forms of restraint, and that with mere unmeaning forms I have no sympathy. But I most strongly and affectionately impress upon you the priceless value of the New Testament, and the study of that book as the one unfailing guide in Life. Deeply respecting it, and bowing down before the character of Our Saviour, as separated from the vain constructions and inventions of men, you cannot go very wrong and will always preserve at heart a true spirit of veneration and humility. Similarly, I impress upon you the habit of saying a Christian prayer every night and morning. These things have stood by me all through my life, and you remember that I tried to render the New Testament intelligible to you and loveable by you when you were a mere baby.

And so God bless you.

Ever your affectionate Father

Charles Dickens

*and 6 bottles of brandy

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Yes