Dossier 6 - Letters from John William Burgon

65 items

These letters were lent by R. H. Inglis Palgrave to Edward Meyrick Goulburn when the latter was writing his biography of Burgon, having been cut for that purpose from the volumes of Turner’s correspondence some time before the end of 1890, when they were presented to Trinity.

Goulburn began work on his biography of Burgon after resigning the deanship of Norwich on 23 April 1889, and it was probably finished by 18 September 1891, the date of the Preface. It was published the following year in two volumes under the title John William Burgon, late Dean of Chichester: a Biography, with extracts from his letters and early journals. The writer observed that the extracts from the letters lent to him by Palgrave constituted ‘the chief interest of the early part of the work’, but he was presumably unaware that he had only been provided with a mere third of Burgon’s letters to Turner, including only one of the first forty-five. He notes, for instance, that Burgon’s visit to Yarmouth in 1838 ‘seems to have been the commencement of an intimacy … with the amiable and esti-mable family of the late Mr. Dawson Turner’ (vol. i, p. 67), a point he would have expressed with more certainty had he been able to inspect the correspondence which preceded the earliest letter put into his hands. It is unclear why he was furnished with such a small selection, nor what principles directed Palgrave in making it. Some of the letters bear pencil annotations in Goulburn’s hand, and he has left among them two separate notes (A6/23 and A6/31).

In notes on publication Goulburn = John William Burgon, late Dean of Chichester: a Biography, with extracts from his letters and early journals, by E. M. Goulburn (2 vols., 1892).