SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886-1967)

Details

SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886-1967)
'In Wild Wales', 3pp. manuscript essay, signed, a working copy with frequent alterations and revisions, discussing a visit to the South Wales coalfields: 'O, ultra-respectable people, for whose eyes this article is written, what hope have I that my words will ever reach you? I remember a middle-aged 'commercial', who told me, one night last week, that the South Wales miners always eat strawberries out of season. "The labouring classes must learn to be more AFFABLE," he boomed. "That's what's wrong wiht the country! And we must get back to a ten or twelve hour day and lower wages for the workmen." Then he drank up his "double-rum-tot", and toddled upstairs to bed. But he will never read my article ... When the young collier of 1921 scribbles his name on a door-post in the abbey garden, he is writing his semi-literate claim on his fellow countrymen for fair and decent conditions of existence ...'; and another 5pp. manuscript on 'Mathematical Concepts'. (2)

Lot Essay

LITERATURE:
First published in The Nation and Athenaeum, vol. XXIX, no. 4, 23rd April 1921, pp.123-24 [Keynes C.136]. The essay 'Mathematical Concepts' is unrecorded in Keynes.

Sassoon 'undertook editorship of the literary page ... At the top of his voice he damned Mayfair cybarites who lived in purple and fine linen while the miners starved' (D. Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon A Poet's Pilgrimage, London, Gollancz, 1973, p.25).

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