BIB_ID
345085
Accession number
MA 8648
Creator
Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965.
Display Date
1905 January 26.
Credit line
Purchased for The Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection as the gift of the Heineman Foundation, 2012.
Description
1 item (8 pages) ; 20.2 x 12.7 cm + envelope
Notes
Signed "W."
Written on mourning stationery with black embossed letterhead: "105, Mount Street, W." Churchill has crossed this address out and substituted "Queen's Hotel, Manchester" instead.
Envelope with stamp and postmarks addressed to "Miss Muriel Wilson / Tranby Croft / Hull." Churchill has also signed the envelope with his initials, "WSC".
Additional provenance information available in the Collection File.
Written on mourning stationery with black embossed letterhead: "105, Mount Street, W." Churchill has crossed this address out and substituted "Queen's Hotel, Manchester" instead.
Envelope with stamp and postmarks addressed to "Miss Muriel Wilson / Tranby Croft / Hull." Churchill has also signed the envelope with his initials, "WSC".
Additional provenance information available in the Collection File.
Provenance
Purchased from Christie's (Sale 2607, Lot 3) for The Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection as the gift of the Heineman Foundation, 2012.
Summary
Thanking her for a photograph and writing that he will "always keep it by me & hope that by looking deeply into it I shall discover the whereabouts of that key of which I wrote some weeks ago"; telling her that he made a speech about Robert Burns the previous evening at a Caledonian dinner: "What a sad life! He had what that book I gave you calls a 'low pain threshold'. The barque of his existence had a low freeboard -- any depression however slight made it dip beneath the surface & the waters of the mournful deep flowed in & over-whelmed his soul"; asking her "Do you ever read his poetry. It is full of true love -- beautiful songs of joy rising from so much misery, like the nightingale singing in darkness. I read a good many over again to refresh my memory. I think I could learn to make love myself on their inspiration"; recommending that she read the poems "Afton Water" and "Mary Morison"; discussing the demands of political life: "Two speeches every day -- always different [--] are most wearing. I have to wrack my brains for new ideas, & strain my memory to recall them. If I stop working I get gloomy. So long as I go on I have no time to think. I have no time to live -- because I have, apart from work, no life to live. You have too much life to live & not enough work to do. There's the difference"; writing that he is thinking of taking new rooms, where he would have more space and would be able to give more dinners at home: "What do you think of that. If it comes off will you come to the first?"; commenting on the political situation in Russia: "Poor impotent Czar. This grand duke Vladimir is a man of spirit. I think the numbers killed & wounded will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. But after all -- as long as the soldiers shoot when told no forcible revolution is possible. The change will come through the [silent] pressure of opinion steadily working in every class of Russian society; and as these fusillades help to strengthen that opinion, I do not think their victims die altogether in vain"; arranging a meeting with her: "[D]on't worry in the least about my convenience. What I want is to see you."
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