SAVE IT FOR THE (AMERICAN) NATION!
How British archives fail us
Patrick Miles
It was a biographer’s dream. For decades Russianists had searched in vain for the archive of George Calderon, top Edwardian Slavist and the man who brought Chekhov’s plays to Britain. Then The Spectator published a letter from me appealing for leads, a reader wrote to me next day, and a year later I was examining the ‘Calderon Papers’ in a Scottish attic. Eight hundred letters from Calderon, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Bell, Rupert Brooke…seven hundred photographs and watercolours…detailed memoirs of George by his contemporaries… My biography took seven years to write, came out in 2018, and was kindly received.
But running beneath it all has been the nightmare of dealing with British archival institutions as the Papers’ owner and I sought a permanent home for them. It’s an experience that Spectator readers may one day find useful.
We agreed that such a rich archive should never be split up; it must be exemplarily curated; and it must be sold because it was part of the owner’s patrimony. But as a British Library archivist put it to me, money was ‘a rather awkward subject’. We had not realised that archival politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. The first archive we approached proudly announced that they had recently raised £1m and would be interested in buying. Then their money was collared by the Library ‘over’ them, which changed its priority to gender studies. Talks were going well with another major library, until its archivist identified us as a threat to his personal plans for the bequest most likely to be drawn on. Four years were wasted on these shenanigans.
The common belief that British archives have ‘no money’ needs qualifying. George Calderon was an Oxford man and the Bodleian Library responded well to us. However, it had no funds available as it had just spent £993,250 on sixty-eight manuscript pages of Jane Austen’s The Watsons long familiar to scholars. Was this necessary in an age of digitisation?
Our archives are addicted to celebrity. The British Library paid £1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers and £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails, yet who can say that posterity will rate these writers as highly as today’s cultural establishment does? There is a sense that archivists are being taken in – or cosying up to that establishment themselves. Obviously, if they want to buy more (small) archives they must set their own price bands that will leave them with enough money.
But I am not convinced that these institutions want to collect archives at all. I could give examples of holdings whose significance was not discovered by scholars for decades; fortunately, these papers were ‘collected’ by old-fashioned archives and conserved until that day. Awe of celebrity means that the archive of someone whose name is not instantly recognised will not be wanted. This fatally affected our attempt to sell the Calderon Papers to the British Library, even though Calderon had been one of their own Slavonic Librarians at the British Museum and they themselves had looked for his papers in the 1970s! If the people on the committees don’t know ‘who’ the subject of the archive ‘is’, they won’t be interested, although this may be dressed up as the archive having ‘low research value’ (something no-one can predict).
Whether British archives are impoverished or not, they will try to bounce you into donating. In retrospect, we were wrong to say that we were determined to keep the Papers in Britain, because that removed the competition. The owner was expected to extend her patriotism to giving the papers away. Worse, in our deliberations with British archivists we sometimes felt that these salaried, process-driven folk believe it is ‘wrong to make money’ out of inherited papers. Such people literally cannot imagine being self-employed or realising your assets.
British archival managers are also deeply suspicious of private sales and independent scholars. Their default is to involve ‘established’ dealers as brokers. These take at least 20% commission from the owner and drive up prices. The owner of the Calderon Papers was perfectly capable of conducting her own negotiations and I provided a detailed description of the archive gratis. These archivists had bought manuscripts through Quaritch and Rota, say, therefore they always must. And they did not trust me, because I wasn’t a tenured academic but some maverick probably after his cut. The alternative, in their view, was to get an ‘independent valuation’ from an auction house. But an auction house can only value ‘lots’, e.g. a letter by Conrad or Brooke. It cannot put a value to the whole for research purposes. Auction valuations of the Calderon Papers were less than a quarter of my own valuation of it as a study archive – the price for which it was eventually sold. To have settled for auction valuations would in any case have been to accept its being split up, which was not on.
We began trying to engage with British archives in 2009 and by 2016 were on our fourth major one. Problems other than money emerged. Many archivists do not have a long attention span. It is often difficult to contact the right person in the first place and he/she may suddenly stop replying, which is known to the rest of us as rudeness. Friends told me of their gifts to archives being ‘lost’. The British Library bought an archive in 2011 that contained a sensational Calderon manuscript, but no mention of it occurred on the Web for the next seven years. Was it being catalogued? Had it disappeared? Even some pages of The Watsons were ‘lost’ by a London library. Calderon’s annotated copy of a Russian book about Chekhov was to be transferred from the open shelves of a Cambridge department library to Special Collections at the University Library, but when it arrived there it was binned as a ‘duplicate’. The emerging picture of British archival incompetence was alarming. I told the owner that the ‘emphasis on PR and media image at the British Library’ made me ‘wonder’ whether core activities such as cataloguing and conservation were being neglected.
Meanwhile, various vultures began to circle. Two of these had ‘no money’, but fancied owning the archive because of an association with George Calderon. The third might find money but my personal experience of its curation did not inspire confidence. Since by this time I was writing a daily blog, ‘Calderonia’, and frantically trying to complete my biography, I found these unwanted attentions from archivists extremely stressful.
Nearly nine years after first approaching a major British library, the owner and I decided we must change tack. There was no point in saving the Calderon Papers for our nation if our nation’s archives did not want them enough. We would save them for the American nation. And there were excellent reasons for doing so: I knew from my own research that American curation is good, you could view in digitised form anything of theirs that you needed to see, and to cap it all George Calderon was an Americanophile, so he would have approved. On 19 June 2018 we approached the Houghton Library at Harvard University about buying the Calderon Papers, on 9 April 2019 they arrived there, and by 9 July 2019 they had been superbly catalogued online.
Given my experience, I cannot recommend tangling with British archives if you have a literary archive that you want to sell. It would be like trying to waltz with treacle. Frankly, I cannot recommend donating anything to a British archive either, as it is likely to be ‘lost’. In the first case, I would approach an American archive direct. In the second, you should conserve family papers yourself and if they are of public interest catalogue them on a home made website. You may be surprised to find how keen a younger generation is to do this.
Of course, we have archivists whose professionalism and vision are to die for. In nine years, however, I had to deal with too many who were dilettantes. They were not focussed on their work as a profession comparable, say, to the Law. Often they ploughed a modest research furrow and projected themselves as academics, complete with the jacket and bow tie. They had manifestly stayed too long in one job. A leading American curator said to me that the problem with British archivists was not that they have ‘no money’, but that they don’t know how to manage large amounts of money. Judging by the inflated prices they have rushed to pay for celebrity archives in recent years, that statement is correct. British archivists’ perennial excuse that they have ‘no money’ for anything from buying small archives to processing collections in real time, is a function of their dilettantism. As a profession, they have reduced themselves to a state of learned helplessness.
Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and Russianist. His biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is available from samandsam.co.uk.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
‘Spectator’
SAVE IT FOR THE (AMERICAN) NATION!
How British archives fail us
Patrick Miles
It was a biographer’s dream. For decades Russianists had searched in vain for the archive of George Calderon, top Edwardian Slavist and the man who brought Chekhov’s plays to Britain. Then The Spectator published a letter from me appealing for leads, a reader wrote to me next day, and a year later I was examining the ‘Calderon Papers’ in a Scottish attic. Eight hundred letters from Calderon, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Bell, Rupert Brooke…seven hundred photographs and watercolours…detailed memoirs of George by his contemporaries… My biography took seven years to write, came out in 2018, and was kindly received.
But running beneath it all has been the nightmare of dealing with British archival institutions as the Papers’ owner and I sought a permanent home for them. It’s an experience that Spectator readers may one day find useful.
We agreed that such a rich archive should never be split up; it must be exemplarily curated; and it must be sold because it was part of the owner’s patrimony. But as a British Library archivist put it to me, money was ‘a rather awkward subject’. We had not realised that archival politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. The first archive we approached proudly announced that they had recently raised £1m and would be interested in buying. Then their money was collared by the Library ‘over’ them, which changed its priority to gender studies. Talks were going well with another major library, until its archivist identified us as a threat to his personal plans for the bequest most likely to be drawn on. Four years were wasted on these shenanigans.
The common belief that British archives have ‘no money’ needs qualifying. George Calderon was an Oxford man and the Bodleian Library responded well to us. However, it had no funds available as it had just spent £993,250 on sixty-eight manuscript pages of Jane Austen’s The Watsons long familiar to scholars. Was this necessary in an age of digitisation?
Our archives are addicted to celebrity. The British Library paid £1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers and £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails, yet who can say that posterity will rate these writers as highly as today’s cultural establishment does? There is a sense that archivists are being taken in – or cosying up to that establishment themselves. Obviously, if they want to buy more (small) archives they must set their own price bands that will leave them with enough money.
But I am not convinced that these institutions want to collect archives at all. I could give examples of holdings whose significance was not discovered by scholars for decades; fortunately, these papers were ‘collected’ by old-fashioned archives and conserved until that day. Awe of celebrity means that the archive of someone whose name is not instantly recognised will not be wanted. This fatally affected our attempt to sell the Calderon Papers to the British Library, even though Calderon had been one of their own Slavonic Librarians at the British Museum and they themselves had looked for his papers in the 1970s! If the people on the committees don’t know ‘who’ the subject of the archive ‘is’, they won’t be interested, although this may be dressed up as the archive having ‘low research value’ (something no-one can predict).
Whether British archives are impoverished or not, they will try to bounce you into donating. In retrospect, we were wrong to say that we were determined to keep the Papers in Britain, because that removed the competition. The owner was expected to extend her patriotism to giving the papers away. Worse, in our deliberations with British archivists we sometimes felt that these salaried, process-driven folk believe it is ‘wrong to make money’ out of inherited papers. Such people literally cannot imagine being self-employed or realising your assets.
British archival managers are also deeply suspicious of private sales and independent scholars. Their default is to involve ‘established’ dealers as brokers. These take at least 20% commission from the owner and drive up prices. The owner of the Calderon Papers was perfectly capable of conducting her own negotiations and I provided a detailed description of the archive gratis. These archivists had bought manuscripts through Quaritch and Rota, say, therefore they always must. And they did not trust me, because I wasn’t a tenured academic but some maverick probably after his cut. The alternative, in their view, was to get an ‘independent valuation’ from an auction house. But an auction house can only value ‘lots’, e.g. a letter by Conrad or Brooke. It cannot put a value to the whole for research purposes. Auction valuations of the Calderon Papers were less than a quarter of my own valuation of it as a study archive – the price for which it was eventually sold. To have settled for auction valuations would in any case have been to accept its being split up, which was not on.
We began trying to engage with British archives in 2009 and by 2016 were on our fourth major one. Problems other than money emerged. Many archivists do not have a long attention span. It is often difficult to contact the right person in the first place and he/she may suddenly stop replying, which is known to the rest of us as rudeness. Friends told me of their gifts to archives being ‘lost’. The British Library bought an archive in 2011 that contained a sensational Calderon manuscript, but no mention of it occurred on the Web for the next seven years. Was it being catalogued? Had it disappeared? Even some pages of The Watsons were ‘lost’ by a London library. Calderon’s annotated copy of a Russian book about Chekhov was to be transferred from the open shelves of a Cambridge department library to Special Collections at the University Library, but when it arrived there it was binned as a ‘duplicate’. The emerging picture of British archival incompetence was alarming. I told the owner that the ‘emphasis on PR and media image at the British Library’ made me ‘wonder’ whether core activities such as cataloguing and conservation were being neglected.
Meanwhile, various vultures began to circle. Two of these had ‘no money’, but fancied owning the archive because of an association with George Calderon. The third might find money but my personal experience of its curation did not inspire confidence. Since by this time I was writing a daily blog, ‘Calderonia’, and frantically trying to complete my biography, I found these unwanted attentions from archivists extremely stressful.
Nearly nine years after first approaching a major British library, the owner and I decided we must change tack. There was no point in saving the Calderon Papers for our nation if our nation’s archives did not want them enough. We would save them for the American nation. And there were excellent reasons for doing so: I knew from my own research that American curation is good, you could view in digitised form anything of theirs that you needed to see, and to cap it all George Calderon was an Americanophile, so he would have approved. On 19 June 2018 we approached the Houghton Library at Harvard University about buying the Calderon Papers, on 9 April 2019 they arrived there, and by 9 July 2019 they had been superbly catalogued online.
Given my experience, I cannot recommend tangling with British archives if you have a literary archive that you want to sell. It would be like trying to waltz with treacle. Frankly, I cannot recommend donating anything to a British archive either, as it is likely to be ‘lost’. In the first case, I would approach an American archive direct. In the second, you should conserve family papers yourself and if they are of public interest catalogue them on a home made website. You may be surprised to find how keen a younger generation is to do this.
Of course, we have archivists whose professionalism and vision are to die for. In nine years, however, I had to deal with too many who were dilettantes. They were not focussed on their work as a profession comparable, say, to the Law. Often they ploughed a modest research furrow and projected themselves as academics, complete with the jacket and bow tie. They had manifestly stayed too long in one job. A leading American curator said to me that the problem with British archivists was not that they have ‘no money’, but that they don’t know how to manage large amounts of money. Judging by the inflated prices they have rushed to pay for celebrity archives in recent years, that statement is correct. British archivists’ perennial excuse that they have ‘no money’ for anything from buying small archives to processing collections in real time, is a function of their dilettantism. As a profession, they have reduced themselves to a state of learned helplessness.
Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and Russianist. His biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is available from samandsam.co.uk.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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