Item 12 - Letter from T. J. Wise to R. B. McKerrow

2 folded sheets

Royal Pier Hotel, Southsea.—Would like to discuss the Marprelate tracts with him.

(Undated. A reference to the ‘3 Vols’ of the Works of Nashe suggests that the letter was written between the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of that work, i.e. between 1905 and 1908.)

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Transcript

Royal Pier Hotel, Southsea
Sunday.

My dear Sir,

I am in receipt of your favor† of the 13th last, and shall be glad to meet you—if you will permit me to do so. Will you dine with us on the evening of Friday Week, when we shall certainly be at home. Please reply to Hampstead, {1} as we leave here tomorrow.

I do hope I did not mislead Mr. Greg by speaking too hastily regarding your work. I certainly did not intend to suggest that I had found any “Errors” in your informed & thorough notes. What I do mean to say is just this. I have always taken much interest in the Plays & Pamphlets of Nash, Green, & Dekker, & have never missed an opportunity of acquiring any of them. Of Nash I have quite a goodly lot, including the “Terrors of the Night”. {2}

Consequently when your 3 Vols. came to hand I compared most carefully what you had to say with the Bibliographical Notes I had made for my own Catalogue. I found that the conclusions at which I had arrived did not at all times agree with the deductions you had drawn,—& upon again examining the tracts themselves by the light of your words, I still found myself unable to fall in with your views. This, I may say, is in regard to the Mar-Prelate Pamphlets.

If you will come & chat the matters over with me for an hour after dinner, I think I shall be able to induce you to agree with me. If not, at all events we ought to get at the certain facts.

Very truly Yrs
Thos. J. Wise

I wish you could be induced to do for Green & Dekker what you are doing for Nash! The work is calling to be done!

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Two letters from McKerrow to Wise of 1909 and 1910, evidently subsequent to this one, were among Sir Maurice Pariser’s collection of ‘Wiseiana’, sold at Sotheby’s on 5 December 1967 (see the sale catalogue, p. 116).

{1} Wise and his second wife were in fact at this time living at 23 Downside Crescent, Belsize Park, but Wise characteristically preferred to associate himself with the more fashionable Hampstead, as he did on announcing his purchase of the house to J. H. Wrenn on 2 March 1900. See Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn: a Further Inquiry into the Guilt of Certain Nineteenth-Century Forgers, ed. Fannie E. Ratchford (1944), p. 180.

{2} Wise’s copy is now in the British Library (Ashley 1258).

† Sic.