Introduction to the case files

After 1841, application forms first introduced by Octavian Blewitt are ubiquitous in the files. While the form was slowly refined over the subsequent century, the types of information it requested remained broadly similar. Application forms were usually filled by applicants, but sometimes friends or Committee members completed a form on an applicant’s behalf. This 1914 application from D.H. Lawrence was supported by the novelist, poet and essayist Maurice Hewlett, who tersely logs Lawrence’s ‘Cause of Distress’ as ‘The War’.

Letters of support from friends of the applicant are very common in the Archive – in Blewitt’s system, these are usually filed after the application form and the initial letter from the applicant. After the first few years, the Fund usually requested two testimonials in support of an author’s application. In this letter, Hugh Walpole writes to support his fellow novelist Dorothy Richardson, describing her work as ‘important […] and honest and brave in its determination to be true.’

While the results of applications are always recorded, the deliberations of the Fund’s Committee often have to be inferred. However, some of the later files do contain reports from Committee members on works submitted by authors. Here, the poet and novelist Walter de le Mare admits that he struggled with Dylan Thomas’s verse, but admires ‘his intellectual and imaginative energy’ and ‘his complete poetic sincerity.’

Where applications were successful, a letter of acknowledgement from the author is usually present (and when they were not, authors sometimes sent protests of varying levels of vociferousness). This grateful letter from Eliza Parsons thanks the Fund’s Committee for their ‘humanity and generosity’ while also making practical arrangements for the provision of the grant.

The Fund asked authors who received payments to provide receipts, and these commonly survive in the files. For much of the Fund’s existence these were standard printed forms that the recipient would fill in. This example is from D.H. Lawrence’s second successful application to the Fund in 1918.

Roderick S Meiklejohn, at 10 Downing Street, to Arthur Llewelyn Roberts, asking his opinion on Constance Garnett, Charles E Pascoe, Alfred Maskell, Henry Rose and Joseph Conrad. Applications sometimes led to additional exchanges between the Fund, its applicants, their supporters and other organisations, including charities, the Society of Authors and the office at 10 Downing Street that administered the Civil List and the Royal Bounty Fund. In this letter, the civil servant Roderick S. Meiklejohn asks the Fund’s secretary Arthur Llewelyn Roberts for his views on five applicants for state aid, including Joseph Conrad, who the Fund recommended for a Civil List pension.

Case files also contain more esoteric materials relating to authors, their lives and their works: these range from subscription lists to poems to the Fund and from heating bills to whole manuscripts. The archive is particularly rich in rare advertising materials: this example describes a ‘solid illustration’ of E. Nesbit’s children’s fantasy The Magic City available for viewing at ‘the Children’s Welfare Exhibition at Olympia’ in Kensington.

The Archive of the Literary Fund was organised by its zealous secretary, Octavian Blewitt, during the 1840s. He took a rather disorderly system from which a number of documents were missing and constructed a rigorous and consistent way of processing and recording applications. This has been refined by subsequent secretaries, but has remained remarkably consistent. Blewitt arranged the case files in individual folders like this one, which houses an application from the poet and artist Matilda Betham.

The majority of the items in the archive are letters written either to the Committee of the Literary Fund or to one of its officers (principally the Secretary after the establishment of that post in 1836). In the records, letters are given as ‘[writer] to [addressee]’, with additional details noted where the letter contains unusual information or is not directly related to an application. In this letter, the poet and journalist John Abraham Heraud lays out his reasons for applying to the Fund at a time when his successful career had been affected by ‘a long series of domestic calamities’, circumstances compounded by the bankruptcy of a journal that owed him £200.

In the early years of the Fund, letters from applicants were the main source of information for Committee decisions. The gothic novelist Eliza Parsons first approached the Fund’s Treasurer, Thomas Dale, in 1792. Parsons was a widow and wrote to support her eight children, but after suffering ‘a Compound Fracture of the worst kind’, she was unable to keep up her usual pace. ‘Still confined to my Room,’ she wrote, ‘my leg on a pillow, Splinters of Bones Continually working thro’ which keep me in extreme Tortures, I have been nevertheless obliged to Struggle with Pain and try to write.’