h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmmm - so what's the final answer then.

T.E. Lawrence, turned down the chance to edit the "Boswell" papers?

OR did Lawrence turn down some sort of medal?

Former, nowt to do with Medals, having re-reread the thread..

DGI+1 ABTD for the Air Force but HD has nailed the final, missing link which is T.E.Lawrence and of course DGI+3 for that HD

Lawrence declined an offer made to him by Isham in a letter(letters linked everything in this QI) to edit the Boswell collection as he was already involved with his translation of the Odyssey.

Technically it wasn't Lawrence or his first fictitious surname of Ross but another surname he went under whilst in India(as it was at that time).

There is of course a DGI+1 going begging if you can tell me the name he was using in 1927 but as it stands at the moment this QI is all done and dusted. I'll post the full explanation (if you can be bothered to read that is)in another post.

Well the history of Boswell's letters and journals is a fascinating one, a story of continuous hidden hoards of the things, stuffed in bags in barns, ferreted away at the back of draws and long lost cupboards etc.
1830 in France and a English officer bought some vegetables from a grocer and was shocked to find that the paper was actually manuscript letters bearing Boswell's name and he rather excitedly asked if she had any more and she said yes as she hadn't used them all up yet!
Now for 70 years these letters which were published in 1856 were the most important existing biographical tool, apart from Boswell's published writings.
Boswell's hereditary estate Auchinleck in Scotland remained unoccupied after 1884 after the death of his last descendant from the male line. The daughter of this descendant married the Irish peer, the fifth Lord De Malahide, and took up residence at Malahide Castle near Dublin. Auchinleck remained unoccupied until it was sold in 1920. Starting in 1905 the Lord and Lady began to empty Auchinleck of the family papers(Boswell's) and they took an interest in Boswell's journals and actually began to type them out but leaving out the more scandalous passages_ with a view to publication. No one was interested.
For years these papers lay undisturbed in Malahide; enter a Yale Professor who was the world's leading Boswell scholar. He wrote in 1921 to the then sixth Lord Talbot asking if he had any Boswell manuscripts? He was blandly denied access but went on to publish his milestone edition of Boswells letters in 1924, believing that most of the journals had been destroyed.
In 1924 the Lord married and his wife tried to have the journals published but again no interest was shown but rumours of their existence had leaked out and the leading American collector of Johnsonia, picked up the scent and sent the Yale Professor to Malahide to secure the journals against 'all comers'.

The American Consul-General and a local archdeacon helped the Prof to get an invite for tea at Malahide in 1925. His heart leapt when he was shown the Oak Room and his eyes fell on the black ebony cabinet ( which it was already known) contained the journals. He said later that he felt like Sinbad in the valley of rubies when he opened one of the drawers, crammed with papers, "in the wildest confusion". The Prof realised that 'a new day had dawned for Boswellians'. Lady Talbot assured the Prof that there were, in addition, two cases of papers from Auchinleck that they had not opened yet. On the spot he offered to edit whatever there was but Lady Talbot declined and he left empty handed.

Exit the Prof and enter Lieut.-Col. Ralph Heyward Isham. Isham was an avid book collector of limited means. After several unsuccessful attempts to meet with the Talbots he finally visited Malahide in 1926, he was a charming, dashing figure of 35 and his charm worked on the Lady and she said she would ask the lord to sell the letters for 10,000 pounds: He wanted the journals more than the letters and he said he would pay that amount for them both. Lord Talbot would not hear of selling the journals.

She later wrote to Isham inviting him back to Malahide and they spent several days going through everything but the journals and agreed on a price of 13,585 pounds.
The collection was remarkable: about 150 letters from Boswell; over 200 to him from the likes of Burke, Burns, Johnson, Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott, Rousseau, and Voltaire.
There was the complete manuscript of his, Account of Corsica and a very small amount of the MS of Life of Johnson, this was the disappointing part: where was the rest of 'Life' ? They concluded that it had been destroyed.

Isham wrote the cheque and left with one of the choicest treasures in English literary history - the entire Malahide Boswell collection except for the journals.The Talbot's agreed to give him publishing rights as well.

I'm sorry this is taking so long and I hope your not completely bored by now but I think I need to spell it all out this way.

Isham badly wanted the journals and after coaxing Lady Talbot she relented and let him look at them again and she also tried to convince her husband to relinquish them..
In the meantime Isham ran into the Prof in a London bookshop and offered him the job of editing the papers for a deluxe private edition. Shouting 'You have stolen my mistress,' he declined, pleading bad eyesight. Isham then offered it to T.E.Lawrence, who was serving the RAF in Karachi. Lawrence had no taste for it, however, and also declined. And so it went.

!927 and Lady Talbot offered Isham all of the journals for 20,000 pounds. Having already spent about 15,000 Pds he was feeling the pinch and he arranged to borrow money from a friend James H. Van Alen.
Heavily censored as that was the only way Lady Talbot could get her husband to part with them the MS journals were sent to Isham in New York in batches. When they arrived, Isham was appalled to find that the Irish Lord had defaced them with black paint and carbon ink, striking out all the naughty bits (and they are naughty by all reports). He was able to read them though by holding them up to the light.
He agonized over breaking a promise to Lady Talbot not to publish them in full but he felt duty bound to literary tastes not the Talbot's moral censure. The Talbot's though angry, later became friends with Isham.

1929 and the De-Luxe edition in 6 volumes is printed and public acclaim follows.

Now the editor they found for this edition tragically died and new man entered the story, another Prof from Yale indeed the 'Sterling Prof of English' and he wanted Isham to expand the publishing project to include all the papers and memoranda. Isham was nearly broke but he said yes to the Prof's idea for the sake of completeness. He had already sold most of his 17Th and 18th century rare books but he would lose not only those but his marriage and his home before he was done.

1930 and he got another shock when Lady Talbot said she had discovered a cardboard box stuffed with additional Boswell papers instead of the expected croquet balls. The papers included another 150 pages of the journal, 110 pages of MS of the Life, letters to and from Boswell, and nothing less than the entire MS of his Tour of The Hebrides.

1932 and a family descendant puts up more papers for auction.

1936 and the edition is ready for publication - 18 vol's plus an index adding another Vol to the total. Isham might now recoup some of his money.

Enter C. Colleer Abbott. Just as the Malahide Edition was about to be published, Isham was stunned to hear of another fantastic discovery of Boswell papers at Fettercairn House in Kincardineshire

Abbott a lecturer at Aberdeen Uni was researching a minor poet called James Beattie an acquaintance of Boswell's and what he found was completely unexpected and also massive, almost half the size of the entire Malahide collection.

After Boswell died, his executor a man named Forbes sorted his literary effects and it seems he never returned a whole heap of papers to Auchinleck and when he died in 1806, they were still at Pitsligo, his home but eventually they found their way to Fettercairn.
When Abbott visited in pursuit of Beattie, the house was owned by Forbe's great-great-grandson, the 21st Baron Clinton of Maxtock and Saye.

I hope your still following me

Abbott's account of his discoveries read like a scholar's archetypal fantasy. Everywhere he turned in the house, in cupboards,libraries,nurseries, attics, chests and dusty sacks he came up with remarkable finds.
In the furtherest recess of an attic, for example, wedged between old furniture, he found an old sack or mailbag 'with rents here and there from which dropped letters'

Virtually all the papers were of the highest value and importance. among them were the complete MS of Boswell's London journal of 1762-3,fragments of other journals, all the letters between Boswell and Forbes, 287 drafts or copies of letters from Boswell, over 1,000 letters written to him, and 119 letters from Dr Johnson to various people, which people had sent to Boswell when he was researching for the Life.

A claim to the papers was made by a hospital in Carlisle and a long lawsuit ensued. Lord Clinton refused to publicize the discovery and for six more years Isham and his editor struggled along with the Malahide papers, in their ignorance believing that it would be complete.
R.W.Chapman, the Johnson scholar and also close friend of Isham's never told a thing about the papers and he was also Isham's publisher ! (What a bastard I thought)
Isham was devastated when he found out about the Fettercairn papers and realised that he only had control of two thirds of Boswell's papers and what would happen to his De-Luxe edition now?

He tore back to Malahide and searched again and would you believe in a tin box he found more papers and a bit of Johnson's diary: The Talbots gave them to the poor man.
The Courts eventually ruled that the Fettercairn papers were owned 50% by the Talbots and the other half by the hospital. Isham wanted them but the second world war intervened and he was in debt to Van Alen for $150,000.

1941 and Lady Talbot contacts him and says that in a grain silo in one of the farm buildings at Malahide two large packing cases have been found stuffed with Boswell papers. Isham was shattered by the news, especially when he was told that the find included nothing less than the complete manuscript of the Life of Johnson (except for the tiny bits he already had) as well as many more letters.

The Talbots had decided to auction them for relief of air raid victims and the Hospital was having second thoughts about letting Isham have their papers and decided to Auction them and the Talbots decided to wait till the war was over to decide about their priceless manuscript. Isham called it a 'a damnable mess.'

After the war Lady Talbot sold the new papers to Isham for the low price of 1750 Pds. They included about 250 letters from Boswell and well over 500 to him, as well as other valuable memoranda such as Johnson's nearly complete manuscript of The Vanity of Human Wishes and 85 more pages of his journal.

The vastness of all this is mind boggling and lucky for Isham another benefactor turned up. Donald F. Hyde, a lawyer and he immediately began giving Isham interest free loans.
He approached the hospital to sell their half of the Fettercairn papers and eventually they did for the sum of 2000 odd pounds. Without the complete Fettercairn papers, no University would contemplate buying his collection and so after 12 long years he had the collection. They were dispatched via the Queen Mary to New York and CBS picked up the story and Isham's photo appeared in all the papers and his acquisition as'the greatest collection of manuscript material that has ever been assembled about a single man or a single period. Isham finally received wide public acknowledgements for his service to literary scholarship.

1949 and Isham sold his collection to Yale for $450,000.
1950 Yale was happy to purchase the 1000 pages of the Life for the low price of 8,000 Pds.
The Hydes (the lawyer and his wife) went to Ireland to pick up the papers and discovered that Lady Talbot had still more papers that she had found, unexpected additions to the journals and the Tour to the Hebrides, more than 200 letters to and from Boswell and other significant documents.
Boswell manuscripts have continued to trickle in to this day.

1950 a trade addition of the journals was published and thirteen more followed the last one in 1989. The volumes of the research editions continue to appear as they are finished.

So that's the story of all the papers and T.E. Lawrence's involvement, and as forCaptain Cook...

Well Boswell went to dinner in London in April 1776 at a family friends place DR Sit John Pringle's house and he met the celebrated Captain Cook and was a of a mind to ask him for a berth on what was to be Cook's fatal last trip.



So that's an end it to it I think. I'll do the scores later

Terrific story, a darned good read! Only thing that occurs to my devious mind....with all these papers turning up chunk by chunk, did no one ever suspect that Lady Talbot was knocking them out herself to pay her dressmakers accounts?

It is an interesting story and there is a little addendum to the story of the Talbots and by default James Boswell...


ROSE TALBOT, then 60, arrived to live at Malahide in Fingal, Tasmania, in 1976. She had just sold another Malahide - the ivy-clad Malahide Castle in Fingal, Ireland - which had been the Talbot seat for 800 years.

Since 1184 a succession of 30 Talbots had lived at Malahide Castle until the death of Rose's brother, Milo, Lord Talbot de Malahide, in 1973. Her Anglo-Irish friends thought her very brave, "Dear Rose, setting orf to Tasmania to live all alone, surrounded by 40,000 sheep."

But she soon made Tasmania and this Malahide really hers. Her great-great uncle William had first settled there in 1824, on 1214 hectares at the confluence of the Break O' Day and South Esk rivers. After the first timber homestead burnt down, the present farmstead was built around 1835. The original holding grew to 8500 hectares, and William was producing fine wool. The property passed to Milo in 1938.

Milo, born in 1912, and Rose Maud were the children of Eva Joicey, an MP's daughter from Northumberland and Colonel Milo Talbot, a veteran of Afghanistan and the Jowaki and Nile expeditions and Egypt's western frontier, where in 1917 he led 35,000 British troops in fighting off a mounted attack by the Senussi bedouin.

The family lived in enormous country houses. Rose was born at Hartham Park, Corsham, Wiltshire, a 68-room Georgian mansion. When she was five they moved to Bifrons estate, near Kent. Jane Austen had written to her sister in 1796: "We went by Bifrons, and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him on whom I once fondly doated." Rose attended school in Kent and in the 1930s was presented to the court of George V.

The colonel had died in 1931 and, in 1948, on the death of his cousin, a descendant of James Boswell, unmarried Milo became the 7th Baron Talbot of Malahide and 4th Baron Talbot de Malahide and Hereditary Grand Admiral of Malahide and the Seas Adjoining. Rose and their mother joined him at the castle.

Milo, eccentric and very clever, entered the Foreign Office in 1937. On being posted to Laos he bought 100 cotton vests and pants that he proposed to throw overboard when they needed washing. When he arrived and found no suitable embassy, he sent the customary telegram, with a twist, "I have arrived and assumed charge, and until further notice I am staying with the Prime Minister." His travels as a diplomat allowed him to pursue one of his passions, botany, and he collected thousands of rare plants and seeds for both Malahides.

After a Tasmanian grazier, Roderic O'Connor of Connorville, offered to buy Malahide, Tasmania, Milo went to see it in 1952. He and Rose visited three years later. The family had not lived in it for about 60 years. Little frogs jumped up Rose's bedroom wall. Milo set about altering and reconstructing the house with the architect Roy Smith; he turned the coach house into a gallery with his growing collection of Australian art, and transformed the garden, but remained a visitor.

There was a want of sympathy between the siblings, and Milo was something of a domestic martinet. In the late 1960s, Rose moved into a comfortable house in Dublin. Milo's discussions about Malahide becoming an official residence of the Irish Government were unresolved on his sudden death at sea while on a Greek cruise. For the next three years Rose lived in the castle but the Irish Government's demand for death duties led to the auction of the contents - hundreds of years of accumulated furniture and treasures, including some beautiful Irish Chippendale (some of which Mick Jagger bought for his French chateau).

In 1976 the castle was sold to Dublin Tourism.

Rose went to Tasmania and, with the help of the architect Clive Lucas, made the house there more elegant and liveable. Dr Brian Morley redesigned the garden.

To a stranger she may have seemed like Miss Marple (Joan Hickson as Marple) but she was nobody but herself. She had a keen sense of duty. She financed the completion of Milo's six-volume The Endemic Flora Of Tasmania (by Winifred Curtis and Margaret Stones); she gave to local causes and was a counsellor for Lifeline. She was personally frugal but a generous host.

Hundreds of Australians, English and Irish enjoyed her hospitality. She was widely admired and liked by her community. She loved the island and especially the Tasmanian light. Although quite reserved, she enjoyed the Australian sense of humour.

Every northern summer for 20 years she would return to England and Ireland, hosting a large dinner party at the Royal Thames Yacht Club and travelling from one country house to another. In Ireland - in the smallest hire car - she motored between castles. Generous sides of salmon would be dispatched in gratitude.

Her constancy, shrewdness, diffidence, curiosity, dry wit - even her companionable silence - bound people to her. As one old friend put it, "she was unexpectedly popular". She lived out her ancient family motto, "Brave and faithful".

While Malahide Castle stands unoccupied on Dublin's coast, the walls and garden of its Tasmanian namesake should continue to rebound to the sounds of Talbots, as another cousin, Richard, and his young family enter its gates.



Definetly the last 'bit' in this QI

Well done, Keith.

Fascinating story, lead me to look up te lawrence and read a couple of his letters, boy are they right when they say the art of letter writing is dead...

Btw i've already mentioned his assumed surname, in relation to another author, but as I looked it won't give the game away here...

Fascinating stuff Keith. It looks to me like you've got a Guide entry pretty much complete there.

Thanks Rod, ABTD, HD, Pepple, GT, Taff, ~jwf~ for taking part and Clive of course who helped me put this together, you may have sensed his 'tricksy' nature lurking here and there in this QI but the mistakes were all mine .

As for a guide entry...hmm, I'd have to do a bit more research into Isham and the others I guess and I'd be a bit worried about the length of the thing as there are so many interesting bits in the story.