Dossier 11.22 - Juvenile essays of A. S. Eddington, with related correspondence

13 essays, 2 letters, 1 envelope.

Gift of Lieutenant Commander C.A. Lund, Aug. 1945

The essays listed below were written by Eddington while at Brynmelyn School, the Quaker school at Weston-super-Mare he attended between 1893 and 1898. They were presented to the Library in August 1945 by Lieutenant-Commander Cyril Alderson Lund, a former member of Trinity, who had found them in a drawer while headmaster of Brynmelyn. Lund also enclosed a letter written to him by Eddington in 1940, probably not long after the discovery of the papers, which, according to Lund, was a response to his inquiry as to ‘how old [Eddington] was when he wrote them’. The plural pronoun, however, appears to be misleading, for Eddington’s letter indicates that Lund sent him only one paper, written in October or November 1896. This was evidently 5, which may have been selected as being the earliest dated item. Corresponding holes in the essay and in Eddington’s letter show that they were formerly pinned together.

It is possible that some, if not all, of the essays were written for inclusion in a school magazine, but no specimens of such a magazine are known to exist [The records of the school, which had closed by the date of Douglas’s biography (1956), do not appear to have survived. There are none at the Somerset Record Office or the Library of the Society of Friends. The Public Library at Weston-super-Mare has a file of information about the school (ref. A\BWG/4/52/14).] . Several of the papers belong to what seems to have been a regular series of astronomical reports, each perhaps intended to cover a month’s celestial activity. Eddington had begun writing these by February 1896, when he mentioned one in a letter to his sister (Douglas, p. 3) [The bursting of an aerolite over Madrid, mentioned in this letter, occurred on the 10th.], but there are no surviving examples earlier than October 1896, unless the date assigned to 6 is incorrect (see below). Douglas also refers to an essay on ‘Jupiter’ (p. 3) and another entitled ‘A Holiday Ride’ (p. 4), written in autumn 1897, from which an extract is given; the whereabouts of these is unknown.

After the papers came into the Library they were simply numbered in the order in which they lay, no attempt being made at a logical arrangement. In compiling the present Catalogue, the opportunity has been taken of arranging the essays in an approximate chronological order, and the numbering has been altered accordingly. The original numbers were as follows: 1 (11), 2 (9), 3 (10), 4 (12), 5 (13), 6 (4), 7 (7), 8 (5), 9 (2), 10 (3), 11 (8), 12 (6), 13 (1). The two letters and the envelope were not previously numbered.

Only five of the essays (4, 5, 7, 8, and 13) are explicitly dated. The first of these lacks the year, but references to certain occultations indicate that it belongs to 1896. 1, 2, and 3, which seem to be the three earliest of the undated items, are paginated respectively 393-398, 399-410, and 411-420, and this may be an indication of their chronological relationship and their closeness in date—though 9, which is probably later (see below), is paginated 369-388. 2 contains a reference to an opposition of Mars—clearly that of October 1894—as having taken place the previous year; it must therefore have written in in 1895, and 1 and 3 probably belong to the same year. 10 contains a reference to the aerolite which burst over Madrid ‘early in 1896’, from which it may be conjectured that the paper was written in 1898, as a reference to either ‘this year’ or ‘last year’ would be expected in 1896 or 1897. 11 is explicitly stated to have been written at the beginning of 1898, and 12 contains an apparent reference to the supposed discovery of a second satellite of the earth by Dr Georg Waltemath, announced in the same year. References in these two papers to other astronomical phenomena have been used to fix the dates more narrowly. 6 and 9 have been tentatively assigned respectively to the years 1897 and 1898 by the character of the writing.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2007, and transferred to the on-line catalogue in 2024.