# - Hudson, W.H.

a rich and detailed correspondence recording his friendship with his future biographer and discussing his life and work, mostly in ink with a few letters in pencil (chiefly from Hudson's later years), some letters docketed by Roberts, about 780 pages, chiefly 4to and 8vo, various places, [March 1897?] to 7 August [1922], in thirteen bundles in a red solander box with red morocco gilt spine, some marginal wear, soiling, and spotting, one letter torn, box restored at joints

H. Bradley Martin, his sale of Highly Important English Literature, Sotheby's, New York, 30 April-1 May 1990, lot 2940

The letters are printed in W.H. Hudson, Men Books & Birds - Letters to a Friend, with a Preface and Notes by Morley Roberts (1925)

perhaps the largest and most significant body of hudson correspondence remaining in private hands. Morley Roberts (1857-1942) and William Hudson corresponded from the beginning of their friendship in 1880, but it was only in 1897 that Roberts began to preserve his letters from Hudson. They record a close friendship that was based on shared intellectual curiosity as well as love of literature, art, and of the natural world.

As these are letters between writers, it is not surprising that many of their most interesting passages are on literary matters. Hudson writes revealingly in these letters on his own work, for example childhood fears in relation to his memoir Far Away and Long Ago: "...The trouble is I don't know whether to go into that subject of a child's fear of darkness & the instinctive idea of a monster 'that doth close behind him tread' in any dark solitary place. I had that feeling so strong in childhood that if I were a good artist with the pencil I could make a startling portrait of the one who used always to follow me – at night among trees I mean. Out on the plain the sense of his presence was quite faint & hardly frightened me..." 

Roberts's work also elicits fine and thoughtful prose from Hudson's pen: "...Of course, poetry more than any other art or form of self expression is a piece out of a man's very soul, a part of himself, or we may say out of his inwards like a birds egg or a spider's web, but even our soul or our inwards absorb some colouring from the time we live in. There's little or no trace of such colouring in your verse; & no doubt the reason is that you abandoned poetry many years ago as a medium of expression and took to prose instead..."

The lives and work of other writers also feature in the correspondence, such as George Gissing, Samuel Butler, Hilaire Belloc, William and Henry James, ("...Their younger brother has just died in America, very suddenly, & Henry James is frightfully cut up about it but dares not tell his brother for fear that it would be too great a shock in his condition..."), and William Morris ("...He thinks he knows our common wild flowers, but even there goes wrong at times & so little about birds that he is afraid to mention any but the commonest. But he worships the earth & sea & sky, & the earth especially...").

Other subjects close to the heart of both men include ornithology, the English landscape, and mankind's relationship with nature, all of which feature strongly in the correspondence. Over the years they also discussed telepathy, aesthetics, and the size of the ears of early humans, but also more day-to-day affairs: Hudson talks of visits to galleries and the cinema, his conservation campaigns, and his personal circumstances including the gradual decline in health of his wife. a unique and evocative correspondence, expressed in hudson's distinctive and richly expressive prose.