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| Siegfried Sassoon archive likely to stay in UK after £550,000 award • Siegfried Sassoon papers attracted interest from US• Cambridge library still short of asking priceA threat that a rich personal archive of Siegfried Sassoon's journals, poems and letters would be broken up or sold to the US appears to have been lifted, it will be announced today.The National Heritage Memorial Fund will say it is awarding £550,000 to Cambridge University's campaign to buy the war poet's literary archive. That means the university is just £110,000 short of the £1.25m needed to secure it from the Sassoon estate.The news, due to be announced at the House of Commons today, has been welcomed by prominent figures involved in the Sassoon campaign, including his official biographer, Max Egremont, who called the archive "extraordinary"."The response to the appeal has been heartening in these difficult times and shows Sassoon's popularity and importance as a writer," he said."It is particularly appropriate that they will be in Cambridge, his old university and a place that he loved."Andrew Motion, a former poet laureate also involved in the campaign, called it "extremely good news"."It is a very rich archive and it has been a lot of money to raise," Motion said. "It is not only good news as a symbolic statement, but a lot of the material in the archive forms the backbone of our understanding of what it was like on the frontline during world war one."The archive – seven boxes of material including private diaries and pocket notebooks – came up for sale after the death in 2006 of Sassoon's son George and there has been interest from US institutions.Motion said the news that the archive seemed likely to stay in Britain should be celebrated. "It's perfectly true that US libraries do an extremely good job of looking after archives, and to say they should be kept here does not imply that they would not be looked after in the US – in fact they are rather brilliant," he said."But I think there is something quite primitive about the connection between the writer and the country they write in. Philip Larkin talked about the meaningful and the magical when it came to archives and this is both meaningful and magical."The campaign to raise the money was launched in June and Cambridge University's librarian, Anne Jarvis, said it had been unsure of what reaction it would get, given the economic climate.She said it was important for the nation that the archive remain in Britain. "[Sassoon] is such a figure and had such an impact on the historiography of world war one," she said.Sassoon, a patriot, joined up as war was about to break out and soon ended up in the unimaginable horror of the western front. The experience traumatised and transformed him.He was a courageous soldier but was sometimes stupidly brave and some of his actions may have been the result of his depression at what was going on around him.In 1917, a year after being awarded the Military Cross, Sassoon published The Soldier's Declaration – a handwritten copy of which exists in the archive. This was his impassioned refusal to return to duty after being wounded.It said: "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." The authorities were furious but his gallantry record probably saved him from retribution.After the war, Sassoon worked for a time as literary editor of the Daily Herald and continued writing. Motion said he considered Sassoon a greater prose writer than a poet: "I've just been rereading his Memoirs of George Sherston and they are really are stunningly good."His love life was complicated and Sassoon had a number of gay relationships with men such as Ivor Novello and Beverley Nichols and a longer affair with the aesthete Stephen Tennant before marrying a woman, Hester Gatty, in 1933. Love letters to Gatty form part of the archive. Dame Jenny Abramsky, the NHMF's chairwoman, said the death this year of the last surviving first world war veteran threw into sharp focus the sacrifice made in service to the nation of so many people. "The National Heritage Memorial Fund was founded to help safeguard our heritage as a lasting memorial to those men and women. Sassoon's archive – full of fascinating personal accounts of his own experiences at war – provides the perfect tribute," she said.Siegfried SassoonHeritageUniversity of CambridgePoetryFirst world warUnited StatesMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Voters Choose Flannery O'Connor in National Book Award Poll In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, the O'Connor collection "The Complete Stories" was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest's 60-year history. feeds.nytimes.com |
Children’s Books: Dangerous Beauty A fantasy novel about a beautiful mind reader whose superpower is a difficult gift. feeds.nytimes.com |
Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens An instant hit that is still drawing crowds a century-and-a-half on, the book brought its author scant rewardsEarlier last month, Disney's A Christmas Carol grossed £1.9m on opening weekend in the UK, and $31m (£19m) in the US. The Observer's Philip French called this latest version of Dickens's Christmas classic "faithfully rendered and extremely frightening", while the New York Times's AO Scott praised Robert Zemeckis's script for retaining much of the "formal diction and moral concern" of the original. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was a triumphant – and profitable – day for Dickens.What most people don't realise, though, is that one of the best-loved (and best-selling) tales in the history of English literature was, for its author, a grave financial disappointment.Published by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843, A Christmas Carol was an immediate success with the public, selling out its initial print run of 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve. But the cost of producing the book, published on a commission arrangement between Dickens and Chapman and Hall, was so high that once the publishers had tabulated their expenses, there was very little left over for the author himself. The main reason: Dickens's own insistence on a lavish format for what was to become the most famous of his holiday books.Dickens wanted A Christmas Carol to be a beautiful little gift book, and as such he stipulated the following requirements: a fancy binding stamped with gold lettering on the spine and front cover; gilded edges on the paper all around; four full-page, hand-coloured etchings and four woodcuts by John Leech; half-title and title pages printed in bright red and green; and hand-coloured green endpapers to match the green of the title page. For Dickens, there was a great deal of excitement and celebration over the arrival of his elaborate new work. "Such dinings," he wrote to his American friend, Cornelius Felton, "such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's huffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before."The excitement, however, was soon to be checked. Upon examining preliminary copies of the Carol, Dickens decided that he disliked the green of the title pages, which had turned a drab olive, and found that the green from the endpapers smudged and dusted off when touched. Changes were immediately executed, and by 17 December, two days before the book's release, the publisher had produced new copies of the book with a red and blue title page, a blue half-title page, and yellow endpapers (which did not require hand colouring). These changes, coupled with a number of significant textual corrections, pleased the young author, who was optimistic about sales. "I am sure [the book] will do me a great deal of good," he wrote to his solicitor, Thomas Mitton, "and I hope it will sell, well." He set the price of the Carol at a reasonable 5s. to encourage the largest possible number of purchasers.Dickens was ultimately elated with the public's overwhelming response. Thackeray famously called the book "a national benefit", Lord Jeffrey commended Dickens for prompting more beneficence than "all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom", and contemporary readers showed their enthusiasm by storming Victorian book stalls with each additional print run. "But the truth," wrote his friend and literary adviser, John Forster, "was that the price charged ... was too little to remunerate [its] outlay."When Dickens received the initial receipts of production and sale from Chapman and Hall, he found that after the deductions for printing, paper, drawing and engraving, steel plates, paper for plates, colouring, binding, incidentals and advertising and commission to the publishers, the "Balance of account to Mr Dickens's credit" was a mere £137. "I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear," he wrote to Forster. "What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!" Even after the close of the following year and the sale of 15,000 copies, Dickens had still only received £726.By February of 1844, less than two months after the Carol's appearance, there were at least eight theatrical versions of A Christmas Carol in production, and since then there have been literally hundreds more adaptations for stage, radio, television, and film. The manuscript of A Christmas Carol itself – one of the crown jewels of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York – has now been digitised in its entirety, and is available for inspection by anyone across the globe, free of charge. Dickens would no doubt be delighted by this munificent online project, but it is no small irony that for this instantly classic Christmas tale of greed and beneficence, Dickens received none of the millions that Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge continue to generate every year.Charles DickensClassicsFictionJon Michael Vareseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The wonder of 'Alice' reawakens in books, film A century and a half after Alice in Wonderland was published, the world will be awash again in wonder. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |