Item 2 - Letter from J. G. Robertson to R. B. McKerrow

90 Regent’s Park Road, N.W.1.—Welcomes the news of the proposed journal.

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Transcript

90 Regent’s Park Road, N.W.1
November 17. 1923

Dear McKerrow,

Moore Smith has just sent on to me your two letters about the projected new English journal.

I should like to thank you for the kind consideration that prompted your first letter to Moore Smith, and to assure you, on my part—I gather Moore Smith has already done so for himself—that, so far from resenting the appearance of a journal for English on lines similar to those of the Mod. Lang. Review, I rejoice in it. Things have come to such a pass in respect of English that Moore Smith has a most disheartening job in having so often to say no to first class stuff, and I, in having to restrict the number of pages I can allow him. Thus your journal will be a welcome relief to us; as it is, from the point of view of English scholarship, a crying necessity.

I gather from your letter that you propose to introduce a number of features distinct from anything we have attempted: This alone should preclude any mutually injurious rivalry. But I am sanguine enough to think that in the matters in which we are interested, “l’appétit vient en mangeant”; and I have some inward satisfaction in thinking that my efforts to create the appetite, in these eighteen years I have run the Review, should have been so successful that that appetite can no longer be appeased by one journal!

Possibly you may at first bring down our circulation; especially as your price is to be so low; but as your circulation this year is not far short of 600, and we managed to carry on in the difficult years of the War with hardly 400, I do not think that, even in the worst case, you will have our extinction on your conscience!

In any case, I wish the new venture every success. If there is any help either Moore Smith or myself can give you, it is unreservedly at your service

Believe me
Yours very truly
J. G. Robertson