Dossier 1 - Stories

The items described under this head are, with one exception, autograph manuscripts of short stories written by McKerrow in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The exception, B1/4, is a series of numbered press-copy sheets, containing a copy of the story ‘The Inevitable Morning’ (B1/3), together with copies of five poems, the originals of which are in B2/13 and B2/15.

The earliest story, ‘Our Trip up “The River”’ (B1/1), was, according to McKerrow’s later annotation, ‘a contribution to a magazine that I tried to start at Wedderlie’. It is in three parts, the first two of which conclude with the words ‘To be continued in our next’. It is unclear whether Wedderlie refers to what Bartholomew’s Gazetteer (1914) calls a ‘shooting-lodge and stream, 1¼ m. NE. of Westruther, Berwickshire’, or some other place; it may be noted, however, that the events related in McKerrow’s story ‘A Strange Adventure’ are said to have occurred while the narrator was spending the autumn at ‘a small house on one of the Scotch moors’. From the style, subject-matter, and handwriting, it must have been written in the 1880s. ‘A Strange Adventure’ (B1/2), which was submitted unsuccessfully to Chambers’s Journal in 1892, was presumably written the same year. ‘The Inevitable Morning’ (B1/3)—the title of which may derive from Emerson’s poem ‘The World-Soul’—is subscribed with the pseudonym ‘Kenneth Niel’ and was written about the same time as a group of poems (B2/13) submitted under the same pseudonym to the Yellow Book about January 1895 (Henry Harland’s letter of rejection is dated the 14th). The next five stories (B1/5–9) are explicitly dated. The dates of the last three items (B1/8–10) are uncertain, but they were probably written at some time in the latter half of the eighteen-nineties.