File 4 - Letters from Alice Walker concerning the Oxford Shakespeare, with related papers

184 items

These papers were formerly in a file labelled ‘MISS WALKER’ (see A4/169). In 1946 McKerrow’s son Malcolm went through the file, removing such letters as had no bearing on Shakespeare and a few others ‘of really trivial content’. This is a pity, as the sequence of the correspondence is at times disjointed. It is clear, too, that some letters relating to Shakespeare are, in fact, missing from the sequence, but it is possible that these were not in the file as Malcolm McKerrow found it.

McKerrow considered producing an original-spelling edition of Shakespeare as early as 1910, but abandoned the idea on learning that another new edition of the writer’s works was underway. In 1929, however, he was invited by the Clarendon Press to undertake just such an edition as he had formerly had in mind. He accepted immediately and spent the remainder of his life working on the project. His progress, however, was slow, mainly owing to the pressure of other commitments and to ill health, and in 1936 he invited a fellow-scholar, Alice Walker, to assist him. With her help a substantial amount of the work for the first three volumes had been completed by the time McKerrow died in 1940, but though Walker continued to work sporadically on the edition for the rest of her life the only part ever to see print was McKerrow’s general textual introduction, published in 1939 under the title Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare.

The letters in this file document this collaboration. Most of Miss Walker’s letters were written at 2 Bankfield Lane, Southport, the house she shared with her parents and her sister. Others were written during extended visits to The White House, Tite Hill, Englefield Green, in Surrey, the home of her friend and literary collaborator Gladys Doidge Willcock, and at 151 Woodstock Road, Oxford, the home of Dr F. D. Chattaway and his wife. It is not known with whom she was staying when she wrote from Pleasington, near Blackburn (A4/4).