Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters

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The Lyttelton/Hart Davis letters were written between 1955 and 1962 by the Hon G. W. Lyttelton (1883-1962) and Rupert Hart-Davis (later Sir Rupert) (1907-1999). Lyttelton had been a master at Eton College, where he encouraged the literary tastes of the teenaged Hart-Davis during the latter's last year (1925-6) there. After Hart-Davis left Eton their paths diverged, but in 1955, by which time Lyttelton had retired and Hart-Davis had become an eminent (if not outstandingly profitable) publisher, they embarked on a weekly correspondence which continued without a break until Lyttelton died.

In 1978, 16 years after Lyttelton's death, Hart-Davis began publishing the correspondence, and by 1984 all the letters had been published, in six volumes.

The letters are bookish, revealing a shared delight in, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, the English language and its literature. Neither man made claim to expertise in music or the visual arts, where their tastes were conventional. Their forte was literature. To admirers of the letters, not least of the pleasures of reading them is being spurred to go and read a poem, a play or a book quoted with approval and delight by one or other of the correspondents. Another diversion is spotting their allusions:

• "Writing in your summer house in January! Please go indoors at once and try no more alfresco composition until the swallow dares. We have aconites and many snowdrops in flower: can Spring be far behind? Yes, it bloody well can, as we shall doubtless see".^[1]

• "I am once again writing in my club – and rather slowly, as I must hear why a stoutish man is urging a still stouter one to have a local and not general anaesthetic. I itch to tell the speaker to be more lucid and set my mind at rest on the precise nature and geography of the contemplated operation. I only think, and cannot be absolutely certain, that the trouble calling for the knife is a boil on the gluteus maximus, but it may be that distressing and almost universal complaint. (‘Poor Alfred, he’s got ’em again,’ as Tennyson’s doctor said when he read Maud.)"

• "You are hereby absolved from struggling with Finnegan's Wake. When an American professor was sent for a review a book called A Key to F.W., he sent it back, saying ‘What F.W. needs is not a key but a lock."

• "I love re-reading. Each night from 10.30 to 12 I read Gibbon out loud. I read slowly, richly, not to say juicily; and like Prospero’s isle the room is full of noises – little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir^[2], come out to listen to the Gibbonian music – ‘Twenty two acknowledged concubines and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations’^[3] – what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?"

Hart-Davis was prominent in pro bono publico works, and Lyttelton was conspicuously well-connected, so their weekly letters contain many first hand comments on, judgements of, and anecdotes about the great and good of the Britain of the post-war era, from Winston Churchill to Malcolm Sargent, from Iris Murdoch to John Gielgud.

The Times' (Philip Ziegler) commented, "If twentieth century civilisation has to put forward one champion by which it will be judged, their letters would not be an unworthy candidate."

All volumes originally published by John Murray Ltd.

• Vol 1 (1955-6 letters) published 1978
• Vol 2 (1956-7 letters) published 1979
• Vol 3 (1958 letters) published 1981
• Vol 4 (1959 letters) published 1982
• Vol 5 (1960 letters) published 1983
• Vol 6 (1961-2 letters) published 1984

In 2001 a single volume abridgement of the full set of letters was published by John Murray. The abridgement, made by Roger Hudson, received widespread and favourable reviews. Hudson added many extra footnotes for the benefit of a new generation of readers. A paperback version of this edition was later released by the same publisher.