T. E. Lawrence's Correspondence with the Political Elite 1922-1935, hand-numbered copy #231 of 427.
Salisbury: Castle Hill Press, 2015. First and limited edition. Hardcover. This is the subscriber’s limited first edition of T. E. Lawrence's Correspondence with the Political Elite, spanning 1922-1935. This volume is a vital and much-anticipated installment in the T. E. Lawrence Letters series published by Castle Hill Press, the premier editors and fine press publishers of material by and about T. E. Lawrence headed by Lawrence’s official biographer, Jeremy Wilson (1944-2017). The edition is limited to a total of 427 copies.
This copy features the publisher’s quarter white linen over gray-paper covered boards, the spine featuring a dark gray Morocco goatskin spine label gilt-stamped with author and title. The contents are bound with yellow silk head and tail bands and feature dark gray-stained top edges, illustrated endpapers, and a tipped-on frontispiece illustration of Lionel Curtis by Augustus John. This copy is hand-numbered “231” on the limitation page. Condition is fine, the binding and contents pristine.
T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) achieved fame from his remarkable odyssey as instigator, organizer, hero, and tragic figure of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, which he began as an eccentric junior intelligence officer, ended as “Lawrence of Arabia,” and recounted in his magnum opus, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But Lawrence’s literary and intellectual reach far exceeded the world and words of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and included engaging facility as a prolific correspondent.
From the publisher: "Many of T.E. Lawrence's contemporaries found it incomprehensible that, while serving in the ranks as Aircraftman T. E. Shaw, he should remain on friendly terms with members of the political elite, some of whom he had known while advising Winston Churchill in the Colonial Office. There was surely a contradiction between these continuing relationships and his rejection of social status."
Among the letters published herein are ten from Lawrence to his friend and admirer Winston Churchill, spanning 1922-1935, as well as Lawrence's inscription in Churchill's copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a 1927 letter from Churchill to Lawrence, and correspondence with Eddie Marsh, Churchill's longtime private secretary. Churchill said of his friend: “Lawrence had a full measure of the versatility of genius… He was a savant as well as a soldier. He was an archaeologist as well as a man of action. He was an accomplished scholar as well as an Arab partisan. He was a mechanic as well as a philosopher. His background of somber experience and reflection only seemed to set forth more brightly the charm and gaiety of his companionship, and the generous majesty of his nature.” (Great Contemporaries, p.166)
Much of Lawrence’s polymath genius scintillates in this correspondence volume. “The correspondents (in alphabetical order) are Nancy Astor, Tory MP for Plymouth Sutton; John Buchan, writer and Unionist MP for the Combined Scottish Universities; Winston Churchill and his Private Secretary Edward Marsh; Lionel Curtis, Fellow of All Souls, editor of the Round Table, and one of the founding organisers of the Royal Institute of International Affairs; Geoffrey Dawson, Fellow of All Souls and Editor of The Times; Lord Lothian, Cabinet Minister; and Ernest Thurtle, the Labour MP for Shoreditch who was responsible, with Lawrence's help, for the abolition of the death penalty for cowardice in the British Army. There are strong contrasts here, for example between the light-hearted letters to Nancy Astor (reminiscent in tone to those he had written to E.T. Leeds before the war), and the deeply introspective letters to Lionel Curtis... Here are his letters to Winston Churchill, his former chief at the Colonial Office, together with less formal letters to Eddie Marsh. The letters to Ernest Thurtle hint at his experience manipulating the political machine. Given the circumstances and the personalities involved, the collection is extraordinary - as are the public tributes paid to Lawrence after his death.”. Item #008012
Price: $500.00