David Jones (1895-1974)

Lot 112
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 3 276
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108911
Lot 112 | David Jones (1895-1974)
Estimate value
£ 2 000 – 3 000
David Jones (1895-1974)
Seven autograph letters signed (‘David Jones’), Harrow, 23 August 1961 - 28 April 1967
One letter to the editor of The Tablet and six letters to Bryn Griffiths. 12 pages in total, 204 x 330mm, with numerous additions in red and green ink. Provenance: Roy Davids Limited, 14 August 1997 and Sotheby's, 16 & 17 December 1996, lot 271.

‘What I am concerned with is the unhistorical and indeed absurd notion that Bosworth and the Tudors were conducive to a conservation of Welshness in Wales. It is manifestly untrue.’ To the editor of The Tablet opening ‘Sir, Your reference in ‘Talking at Random’ (Aug 19th) to the Welshmen from the U.S.A. who would have Bosworth annually recalled prompts the following comment’. Arguing, ‘Half a century after Bosworth was the seeming fulfilment of Merlinesque prophecies that a Welsh king would wear the ‘crown of London’, the Welsh language was banished from the Welsh courts of justice: a matter not remedied until our own time’, he continues, stating that the Welsh ‘hate any form of innovation’ and that the 1506 Act of Union ‘determined (what was, perhaps, in any case, inevitable) the slow but cautious anglicisation of Wales’. Concluding the present letter with discussion of how the aim of the central policies in these instances was ‘to persuade Welshmen that the more English they became the better it would be’, he provides 11 December 1282, the Battle of Orewin Bridge, as an alternative date ‘which Welshman should annually recall’. To Griffiths he writes predominantly concerning corrections and proofreading comments: ‘I searched about in my stuff and found a gallery-sheet of that part of the The Anathemata which I cut up & have pasted together the bits with all the necessary corrections, for your Anthology’. In another letter (‘I’m in the throes of a large amount of proof-correcting at the moment’), he discusses in detail some of the corrections being made: ‘I wanted some word that suggests ‘auspicious’ without saying it’. He also mentions the matter of the contractual arrangements – ‘These legal contracts I find hard to follow’ – and gives a full page of explanatory notes for Yr Offeren Gwenhwyfar.

Bryn Griffiths was editor of Welsh Voices: An Anthology of New Poetry from Wales, published in 1967.
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