LETTERS

“Although Buchanan was a prolific letter writer and carried on an extensive correspondence with a large number of important and interesting Victorians, no collection of his letters exists. Harriett Jay includes a few in her biography, as well as a few scattered excerpts from his diary, but my advertisements for such personalia both in Britain and the United States have met with scant success.”

After reading the above passage in John A. Cassidy’s Robert W. Buchanan (Twayne Publishers Inc., 1973) I thought I should make my own enquiries into what happened to Robert Buchanan’s personal papers after his death. Buchanan suffered a stroke on 19th October 1900 which, according to Harriett Jay’s biography “rendered him helpless as a little child”. He seems to have endured this state for the next eight months until he finally passed away on 10th June 1901. From this I surmised that Buchanan probably made no provision for the dispersal of his estate which then would have passed directly into the hands of his only surviving relative, his adopted daughter and sister-in-law, Harriett Jay. As Cassidy notes she does refer to using Buchanan’s diaries and letters in the biography so I think it is safe to assume that that is the case.

Harriett Jay never married and died in 1932, so I obtained a copy of her will, hoping that there would be some mention of Buchanan’s papers. Although the will refers to a portrait of Buchanan and assigns money for the upkeep of his grave, it does not mention his papers directly. The bulk of her estate she left to her nephew William Paul Jay of 56, Roydene Road, Plumstead, S.E. 18, including “all my books and papers”, which I suppose could also include whatever remained in her possession of Buchanan’s papers. I have put a copy of the will on this site and I shall continue to attempt to trace the descendants of William Jay - any help would be much appreciated.

I have contacted the obvious places in search of Buchanan’s papers, including the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and his final publishers, Chatto & Windus (now part of the Random House Group) but there doesn’t seem to be an extensive Buchanan archive located anywhere. Instead, there are just odd pieces of correspondence scattered around various institutions, whose survival in many cases is due more to the recipient’s reputation than Buchanan’s. A list of these locations is available below and I have now begun the process of adding Buchanan’s letters to the site.

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The Letters of Robert Buchanan

Letters to Robert Browning (1864 - 1879)

[A collection of 40 letters belonging to the Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand.
Plus two additional letters, one from the Library of Congress, the other from the British Library.]

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Letters to Roden Noel

[Nine letters and three fragments from the collection of Desmond Heath, author of Roden Noel: A Wide Angle.]

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Random Letters

[Letters from other sources - mainly ebay.com.]

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List of Locations of Buchanan’s Letters and Related Material