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Winston Churchill important TLS regarding his book, "Marlborough: His Life and Times"
Winston Churchill important TLS regarding his book, "Marlborough: His Life and Times"
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Churchill Winston

Two page TLS, 8" x 10" on stationery stock with letterhead address of 11, Morpeth Mansions, Westminister, S.W.I. Dated "10th October, 1935". The letter is both annotated and signed twice by Winston Churchill. Once as "Winston Churchill". With additional annotations in Churchill's hand of "Dear Mr. Wood, "; "abouts in the books, "and  "Also I will send some of the books you may not have. W."  Typed on rectos with versos blank. Expected folds and residual paper clip staining to upper left corner.

Winston Churchill writes to C.C. Wood, chief copy editor at George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, relating to the publication of his monumental biography, "Marlborough: His Life and Times", published in four parts and published 1933-1938. This exceptionally rare letter signed by Churchill and with several annotations in Wood's hand, relates to the editing of this extensive and highly researched book. The letter is shown in full below:

"Dear Mr. Wood,

Many thanks for your letter. The aid I want is not researching but checking and verifying facts which have already been ascertained. I will dictate a section of a chapter from the many works of reference I have read. I will them mark the various points which require to be more precisely verified, for instance the actual word of a quotation, the exact reference in the footnotes, dates, names, chronology, etc. This is very similar to the work which your readers already do when they read the proofs only it would be rather more extended. At the same time as I send the section for checking I will mention the books where the references occur and give the closest indication I have as to where they can be found. (annotated with Also I will send some of the  books you may not have. W.) This will enable me to get on a good deal more quickly. Let us anyhow make the experiment and see what trouble is involved for your staff".

Yours sincerely,

WS Churchill"

Winston Churchill is one of the best-known, and some say one of the greatest, statesmen of the 20th century. Though he was born into a life of privilege, he dedicated himself to public service. His legacy is a complicated one‾he was an idealist and a pragmatist; an orator and a soldier; an advocate of progressive social reforms and an unapologetic elitist; a defender of democracy as well as of Britain’s fading empire‾but for many people in Great Britain and elsewhere, Winston Churchill is simply a hero.

The TLS, written but a few years before the advent of WWII and becoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill tasked himself to write the biography of Marlborough, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who started his court service as a page during the reign of Charles II and ended it as Master-General of the Ordnance of the English army under George I. He served under five sovereigns, distinguished himself on the battlefield and as a diplomat, and was once even imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason. Handsome and charming - Lord Chesterfield described him as “irresistible to either man or woman” - Marlborough’s military strategy led the Duke of Wellington to say that he could “conceive nothing greater than Marlborough at the head of an English army.” Future prime minister Winston Churchill, who was named after Marlborough’s father and was the nephew of the Eighth Duke of Marlborough, wrote this history of his famous ancestor to refute earlier criticisms of Marlborough by the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. “Though it was a commissioned work, Churchill would not have invested nearly a million words and ten years had it not had special significance for him. For he wrote about a man who was not only his ancestor, an invincible general, the first of what became the Spencer-Churchill dukes of Marlborough, and a maker of modern Britain, but also a supreme example of heroism in the two vocations which mainly interested Churchill and in which ultimate triumph seemed to have eluded him - politics and war making” (Wiedhorn, 110). “It may be his greatest book. To understand the Churchill of the Second World War, the majestic blending of his commanding English with historical precedent, one has to read Marlborough. Only in its pages can one glean an understanding of the root of the speeches which inspired Britain to stand when she had little to stand with” (Langworth, 164). “The scholarship seems formidable, as in no other of his works. Picking his way through conflicting testimony and evaluations, Churchill, while leaning on William Coxe’s 1818 biography of the duke, carefully weighs each writer’s reliability. Yet the tone is not as detached as might be expected from an academic historian… Marlborough, with his broad European view and his apparent sense of Britain’s imperial destiny, is the fulcrum, and all the other characters, parties, and issues take their places accordingly… the literati hostile to Marlborough - Pope, Swift, Thackeray, Macaulay - are harshly expelled from the witness stand” (Wiedhorn, 113-114).

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