Documento 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 no. 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.

Research by Dr Florian Laguens has revealed that all these essays were read as part of the Brynmelyn Literary Society, an internal club at Brynmelyn School in Weston-super-Mare, which brought together around twenty pupils each month. The Society’s minutes, which provide a summary of the essays, enable them to be dated.

Only five of the essays (4, 5, 7, 8, and 13) are explicitly dated. 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. The essays were then arranged in an approximate chronological order based on internal evidence, with the numbering being 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. Subsequence research has shown that this new ordering is substantially correct, though a couple of items are slightly out of place.

Minutes of Brynmelyn Literary Society, 1890-1904 (handwritten by Eddington on 13 December 1897). Volume 1: June 1890 - June 1895. Volume 2: June 1896 – June 1904. Nothing remains from the year 1895-1896. Weston-super-Mare, Weston Central Library, Frederick Woods Room, L 37.5 BRY.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2007, and transferred to the on-line catalogue in 2024. It was updated in 2025 after the receipt in Oct. of that year of research by Dr Florian Laguens supplying dates and further details from the minutes of the Brynmelyn Literary Society.