C. J. Wright - Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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C. J. Wright was Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Library until his retirement
in 2005.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [13] 89; [23] 87; [35] 35; [48] 90; [59] 89

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The Passing of a Bookseller

C. J. Wright on the bookseller John Stephens

He was still looking for that last volume. If anyone could have found it, he could. That’s how good he was at his trade. As I stood at the graveside on a bright spring day, on that exposed ridge above the Evenlode valley, I supposed that now I would never possess a copy – that the one book for which I had been searching so long had eluded me. Then I felt guilty that I was thinking of myself and not of him. It was, after all, his day.

Confessions of a Manuscripts Curator

C. J. Wright on Manuscripts

Literary manuscripts began to be collected in the eighteenth century – though in the case of Shakespeare, none of whose handwriting was known to survive, with the exception of a few signatures, all different, they had to be manufactured first by the enterprising hand of W. H. Ireland. In the 1790s, Ireland revealed to an astonished world examples of Shakespeare’s correspondence and even a hitherto unknown play, Vortigern, before the final exposure of his forgeries.

The Missing Librarian

C. J. Wright on escaping the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books

Somewhere high in the Austrian Alps there may lie the body of a librarian, for that is where Robert Proctor was last seen, at the head of the Taschach valley, on the morning of Sunday, 6 September 1903.

‘Is there any news of the iceberg?’

C. J. Wright on the archives of Punch

Alan Coren was on fire. Or, at least, smoking. He was also ablaze with enthusiasm. In due course, the cigarette was extinguished. The enthusiasm was not. It was 2004 and he had come to see the archives of Punch, which the British Library had just acquired. Coren had worked on the magazine since the early 1960s and been its editor between 1978 and 1987. After he left, it went into a terminal decline, ceasing publication in April 1992. The title was eventually purchased by Mohamed Al Fayed and relaunched in 1996 but finally sank in 2002.

An Epiphany at the British Museum

C. J. Wright on Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

Edmund Gosse, son of the famous naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, had worked at the British Museum since he was 17. His father’s friend Charles Kingsley had helped secure him the post of Junior Assistant in the Department of Printed Books. For someone with literary ambitions, this must have seemed an attractive position but it was, in fact, a clerical treadmill. With the other Juniors, his task was simply to write out the seemingly endless stream of revised entries prepared by his seniors for the catalogue of what was then the largest library in the world.

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