Notes

From the editor's introduction:

"There is something especially satisfying in the coincidence that two London archives situated just a mile apart hold collections of letters which, when collated, bring together the complete surviving correspondence exchanged between two of the leading voices in British poetic drama active during the first half of the twentieth century. With only the occasional letter or postcard mislaid, the sequence of 900 items otherwise stretches unbroken from the moment in 1906 when Gordon Bottomley invited Thomas Sturge Moore to contribute to a poetry anthology, until Moore’s death nearly 40 years later. With everything being preserved on both sides – in the Bottomley papers at the British Library, and the Sturge Moore papers at Senate House, University of London – and with each piece of the huge jigsaw slotting neatly into place, the outcome seems like an immaculately pre-planned joint performance, rather than the outcome of mere good fortune. More to the point, what we are offered is a uniquely detailed insight into a little understood and largely overlooked cultural milieu, a journey from the fin de siècle into the troubled waters of modernism, rich in anecdote and incident, and a commentary on the lives and works of a range of important if rarely examined figures in literature and the visual arts."