© Institute of Historical Research 2007. Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 215 (February 2009)Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKHISRHistorical Research0950-3471© Institute of Historical Research 2007>XXXOriginal ArticlesThe papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906)The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906)

The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906)*

David Saunders

Newcastle University

Abstract

This note draws attention to the recent discovery of the papers of the Chartist and newspapereditor W. E. Adams (1832–1906), summarizes their contents and explains why they are to be

found in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow.

No account of nineteenth-century British radicalism would be complete withoutreference to the Cheltenham-born autodidact, printer, Chartist, republican, journalistand long-serving editor of the

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle

, W. E. Adams (1832–1906).Adams’s

Memoirs of a Social Atom

, the story of a man who had ‘mingled with no greatpeople, been admitted to no great secrets, met with no great adventures, witnessedno great events, [and] taken part in no great transactions’,

1

is a classic of Victorianworking-class autobiography. But as one of the most skilful handlers of the genrehas pointed out, autobiography ‘contains certain inherent distortions and biases’.

2

It is sensible, therefore, to correlate autobiographies with material of other types.Unfortunately, evidence about Adams’s life other than that in his memoirs is notvoluminous. Introducing the modern reprint of the memoirs in 1968, John Savillepointed out that Adams’s ‘papers and correspondence . . . have not been found’.

3

In1984, he said as much again in the

Dictionary of Labour Biography

.

4

Reiterating in 1988that ‘There is no known collection of the papers and correspondence of Adams’,Maurice Milne added that ‘he figures only slightly in the Joseph Cowen collection atthe Central Reference Library, Newcastle upon Tyne’.

5

In 1991 Owen Ashtonlamented the relative paucity of ‘private letters, notes and diaries’ for Adams’s careerafter 1855, ‘even though there was some evidence to suggest that Adams had himselfat least preserved them for posterity’.

6

The greater part of the relevant privatecorrespondence, Ashton felt, ‘may well have been lost from sight following the deathin the mid 1950s of . . . Adams’s daughter-in-law by his eldest son, Ernest WellesAdams’.

7

Although, in the

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

in 2004, ProfessorAshton referred readers to several manuscript collections in which material from

* The author is greatly indebted to Joan Allen and Owen Ashton for their help with this note.

1

W. E. Adams,

Memoirs of a Social Atom

(2 vols., 1903), i, p. xiii.

2

J. Rose,

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

(New Haven and London, 2001), p. 2.

3

W. E. Adams,

Memoirs of a Social Atom

, with an introduction by J. Saville (2 vols. in 1, New York, 1968),p. 26.

4

Dictionary of Labour Biography

, ed. J. M. Bellamy and J. Saville (10 vols., 1972–2000) (hereafter

D.L.B.

),vii. 4.

5

M. Milne, ‘Adams, William Edwin (1832–1906)’,

Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals

, ed.J. O. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (3 vols., 1979–88), iii. 18.

6

O. R. Ashton,

W. E. Adams: Chartist, Radical and Journalist (1832–1906): ‘An Honour to the Fourth Estate’

(Whitley Bay, 1991), p. 3.

7

Ashton,

W. E. Adams

, p. 19.

Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 215 (February 2009) © Institute of Historical Research 2007.

The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906) 177

Adams was to be found, he was still not able to point to a collection which stemmedfrom Adams himself.

8

Then in April 2006 Bob Henderson, a doctoral student at Queen Mary, Universityof London, drew this author’s attention to an entry in the 2004 guide to the RussianState Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow (which will be referred tohereafter by its Russian acronym, R.G.A.S.P.I.). In translation, the entry reads:

ADAMS, William E. (1833–1906?) – participant in the Chartist movement in England,journalist, editor of the ‘Newcastle Weekly Chronicle’.

Classmark 222, 1 inventory, 250 files, 1848–1906. Chronological catalogue. Microfilm.Documents in English.

9

Further investigation revealed that the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdamholds a copy of the microfilm to which the Moscow guide refers.

10

An earlier descriptionof the holdings of R.G.A.S.P.I., published in 1993 at a time when the archive wascalled the Russian Centre for Preservation and Study of Documents of ContemporaryHistory, also contains the above brief description of the Adams collection.

11

Thus Adams’s papers, or some of them, have come to light. When completing herrecent book on Joseph Cowen,

12

Joan Allen went to Amsterdam to look at themicrofilm of them. She tells this author that they include manuscripts of the manyessays Adams wrote from the age of sixteen onwards, not least his celebrateddisquisition on tyrannicide (classmark 222, inventory 1, file 28); his diary for the years1850–6 (file 2); an ‘Appeal of the Committee of the Cheltenham RepublicanAssociation to their Brethren’ (9); the rules of the London Republican Association(24); letters to Edward Truelove, the publisher who was prosecuted in 1858 forpublishing Adams’s essay on tyrannicide (51–68); and letters that Adams received fromThomas Allsop (109), Charles Bradlaugh (69, 76, 88, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 99, 112–13,116–21, 128–9, 142–3, 149–55, 162, 164, 168, 171, 173, 176, 179, 184, 195), AliceBradlaugh (114), Joseph Cowen (208, 218), Henry Fielding (80), George Harney (197,200–2), Marie Harney (209–10), T. B. Potter (83–4), J. P. Robson (115), Sir JamesStansfeld (71), Alfred Talandier (163), James Thompson (87, 94), James Trotter (123–5),Edward Truelove (72, 73, 75, 77, 100–8, 110–11, 175, 194), James Watson (89, 132,135, 138–9, 145) and John Watts (86, 91, 97–8). Other items in the collection willbecome evident in the correspondence cited below.

Why have these papers only now come to the attention of scholars, and how didthey find their way to Moscow? The first question is relatively easy to answer. Theearliest materials at R.G.A.S.P.I. stem from the collections of three bodies establishedat the beginning of the 1920s: the historical department of the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Marx-Engels Institute and the LeninInstitute. When these bodies were amalgamated in 1931, their holdings became thebasis of the Soviet Union’s Central Party Archive. This consolidated repository did

8

O. R. Ashton, ‘Adams, William Edwin (1832–1906)’,

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(Oxford, 2004)<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/42327> [accessed 28 June 2007]. Professor Ashton has also writtenthe entry on Adams in the forthcoming

Dictionary of 19th-Century Radical Journalism

, ed. L. Blake and others (2008).

9

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii: kratkii spravochnik

, ed. K. M. Anderson andothers (Moscow, 2004), p. 208.

10

See the relevant page of the ‘Index of archives’ on the Institute’s website <http://www.iisg.nl/> [accessed5 May 2007].

11

Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii: kratkii putevoditel´

, ed. Dzh. A. Getti( J. Arch Getty) and V. P. Kozlov (Moscow, 1993), p. 205.

12

J. Allen,

Joseph Cowen and Popular Radicalism on Tyneside 1829–1900

(2007).

© Institute of Historical Research 2007. Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 215 (February 2009)

178 The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906)

not publish readily accessible finding aids or encourage the free use of its holdings.To quote the introduction to the handbook that it eventually released in 1993,

the functions of the party archive had nothing to do with ‘public service’ or broad researchaccess to archives, even by Soviet scholars . . . Until the end of the 1980s, Soviet historians –even party members – working for non-party institutes or universities were routinely deniedaccess to the collections, as were all foreign scholars.

13

The archive opened its doors only after the passing of Soviet communism. Its 1993handbook was the first to be generally available. Before then, even specialists couldnot have known that Adams’s papers were in Moscow.

The second question, how the papers found their way to Moscow, is a little harderto answer. Although it is common knowledge that in the nineteen-twenties theMarx-Engels Institute dedicated itself to acquiring materials on the history of socialismin all parts of Europe and the United States,

14

and although an archivist at R.G.A.S.P.I.has recently collaborated with an American scholar on a study of the archive’s manyacquisitions in France,

15

British papers at R.G.A.S.P.I. are not very numerous. Or tobe more precise, British personal papers are not very numerous there (the papers ofthe British Communist party at the archive are extensive indeed).

16

The 1993 guideto the archive lists only two or three British people in its sixteen-page appendix on‘Personal archives of foreign socialists and communists’.

17

What, then, inspiredMoscow to go to the trouble of acquiring the papers of W. E. Adams?

The archive’s record of its acquisition of the Adams papers makes clear that whatinitially attracted the Marx-Engels Institute about them was not Adams himself buthis friend George Julian Harney, for Harney had collaborated with Marx, and Marxwas the Institute’s overriding concern.

18

When, therefore, on 18 October 1930, theInstitute’s agent in London, Harry C. Stevens,

19

wrote to Moscow to say that he hadbeen alerted by a certain Pollard

20

to the fact that papers stemming from Adams had

13

Getti and Kozlov, p. viii.

14

For a standard Soviet account of its activities, see

Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR

, ed. M. V.Nechkina (5 vols., Moscow, 1955–85), iv. 210–11. For proof that the Institute was making enquiries inLondon as early as 1922, see R. Samuel, ‘The Bishopsgate Institute’,

History Workshop Jour.

, v (1978), 163–72,at pp. 166–7.

15

J. Beecher and V. N. Fomichev, ‘French socialism in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Moscow: David Riazanov andthe French archive of the Marx-Engels Institute’,

Jour. Modern Hist.

, lxxviii (2006), 119–43.

16

They underpin, for example, A. Thorpe,

The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920–43

(Manchester, 2000).

17

Getti and Kozlov, pp. 205–20. Apart from Adams, the only other obviously British person in thisappendix is John Francis Bray (1809–97, a utopian socialist and follower of Robert Owen), but one might alsocount Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

18

Harney’s letters to Marx and Engels are to be found in

The Harney Papers

, ed. F. Gees Black andR. Métivier Black (Amsterdam, 1969), pp. 237–363. See also D. Goodway, ‘Harney, George Julian (1817–97)’,in

D.L.B.

, x. 81–92; D. Anderson, ‘Harney, George Julian (1817–1897)’, in Baylen and Gossman, ii. 227–33; andV. Kunina, ‘Dzhordzh Dzhulian Garni’, in

Marks i Engel’s i pervye proletarskie revoliutsionery

, ed. E. P. Kandel’(Moscow, 1961), pp. 405–38.

19

The School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London (S.S.E.E.S.) has a30-file Stevens archive the outline of which says that he was the London agent of the Marx-Engels Institutebetween 1929 and 1935 (see the ‘Library and archives’ section of the S.S.E.E.S. website <http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/> [accessed 5 May 2007]).

20

Stevens gives no first name, but the author is grateful to Professor Kevin Morgan of the University ofManchester for pointing out that this is surely the bookseller and bibliographer (Henry) Graham Pollard (1903–76), son of A. F. Pollard, the first director of the Institute of Historical Research. As the

O.D.N.B.

’s entry onthe younger Pollard makes clear, he was an active communist in the 1920s (M. L. Turner, ‘Pollard, (Henry)Graham (1903–76)’,

O.D.N.B.

<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47614> [accessed 28 June 2007]).His extensive but disorganized papers are at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 215 (February 2009) © Institute of Historical Research 2007.

The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906) 179

become available for purchase, it was natural for him to centre his letter on Harney.Although he began the letter by saying that he was not yet in a position to specifywhat precisely Adams’s papers included, he made clear at once that ‘there weredefinitely letters from

Harney

in them’. He and Pollard had been to see what was onoffer. The vendor was the ‘wife of Adams’ grandson’. Apart from Harney’s letters toAdams, the material included a number of other items which were likely to appealto Moscow: ‘letters from

John Watson

and his wife, giving interesting details, fromJohn Watts, T. B. Potter M.P., a note from

Worcell

, [and] letters from

Bradlaugh

(quitea number)’; a manuscript in Harney’s hand about ‘a large print of the Chartistconvention in 1839’; ‘a quantity of

Adams’ own MSS

, including the famous pamphleton tyrannicide’; and ‘one or two good photographs of Harney in 1892 or thereabouts,including the well known one reprinted in the N.W.C. [

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle

]’.Although the price was a rather steep twenty pounds, Stevens considered it worthpaying, not least because the vendor had promised to ask her brother-in-law, theeditor of the

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle

, ‘whether there is a set of the years we wantavailable’, as well as to ascertain whether she could provide any other Harneymaterial. She also possessed ‘two well preserved print portraits of John Frost andRichard Oastler’ in which the Moscow Institute might be interested.

21

The Institute wrote to Stevens on 28 October 1930 to say that Adams’s papersrepresented ‘a find of first class importance’. Although it regretted that the Harneyletters did not relate to the period of his collaboration with Marx and Engels, and didnot find the Chartist material ‘so interesting as might be hoped’, it thought that closerinspection might reveal additional nuggets: ‘Harney’s biography is on our immediateprogramme and we are anxious to collect as much as we can as soon as we can’.

22

On 10 November 1930 Stevens admitted that

although it is true that none of the material deals with the earlier period of Chartism (Adamsonly came into the movement right at the end, about 1848/50) nevertheless, such letters areso rare, the likelihood of more turning up so remote, that ipso facto a certain minimum ofabsolute value is conferred on them.

23

21

Moscow, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (hereafter R.G.A.S.P.I.), classmark (hereafterf.) 71 (the classmark of the Marx-Engels Institute), inventory (hereafter op.) 50 (an inventory containingcorrespondence between the directorate of the Institute and its foreign representatives), file (hereafter d.) 198,folios (hereafter ll.) 24–6 (underlining in the original has been replaced with italics). For the Chartist James(not John) Watson (1799–1874), the educationist and social reformer John Watts (1818–87), the politicianT. B. Potter (1817–98, M. P. for Rochdale from 1865 to 1895), the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91),the Chartist John Frost (1784–1877), and the factory reformer Richard Oastler (1789–1861), see entries in the

O.D.N.B.

Stanislaw Worcell was a Polish émigré. Although the vendor of the Adams papers does not appearby name in Stevens’s letter, Stevens calls her ‘the wife of Adams’ grandson’ and says that the editor of the

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle

was her brother-in-law. In 1930–1, the editor of the

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle

wasW. E. Adams’s elder son, Ernest Welles Adams. The vendor may therefore have been the wife of Adams’syounger son, Horace Owen Adams (although in that case she could not have been, as Stevens says she was,the wife of Adams’s grandson). If she was indeed Horace Adams’s wife, her name was Amy Anita (see Ashton,

W. E. Adams

, pp. 154, 157 n. 56). Horace and Amy Adams lived in the London area and were thus accessibleto Graham Pollard and Harry Stevens. Why W. E. Adams’s papers were in the hands of his younger ratherthan his elder son is unclear, but since W. E. Adams wrote

Memoirs of a Social Atom

in Madeira, perhaps hetook his papers with him to write the book and, having completed it, left them in the hands of his youngerson when he was on his way back to Newcastle.

22

R.G.A.S.P.I., f. 71, op. 50, d. 198, l. 37.

23

Owen Ashton points out that Stevens’s description of the years 1848–50 as ‘right at the end of Chartism’is not acceptable to historians. ‘Any modern Chartist text’, he says, will show that the movement remainedimportant until 1858 (private communication, 3 May 2007). For confirmation of this point see, e.g., E. Royle,

Chartism

(3rd edn., New York, 1996).

© Institute of Historical Research 2007. Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 215 (February 2009)

180 The papers of W. E. Adams (1832–1906)

The vendor, Mrs. Adams, had now found Adams’s diary for the first half of theeighteen-fifties. Apart from personal reflections, it contained material on W. J. Linton,Kossuth, Worcell, Mazzini, the London Republican Society and the republicanmovement generally.

24

On 9 December 1930 Stevens gave a fuller list of Adams’scorrespondents, who included not only the people whom he had mentioned on18 October but also Thomas Allsop, Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, Joseph Burtt, JosephCowen, James Glover, Linton, Alexander Somerville, Alfred Talandier and EdwardTruelove. ‘In addition there are several pamphlets of the sixties, Adams’ diaries asreported, three photographs of Harney in his old age, a number of newspapers andnewspaper cuttings, and some odds and ends. Altogether a mixed collection!’

25

Underthe heading ‘

Harney

’, the Marx-Engels Institute wrote to Stevens on 30 January 1931to say that it had decided to buy the collection.

26

This description of Adams’s papers in Moscow and of the process which led to theMarx-Engels Institute’s purchase of them in 1930–1 provides an additional lead in thefield of nineteenth-century British radicalism, serves as a reminder that manuscriptmaterials may come to light in places remote from their point of origin, and illustratesthe lengths to which the young Soviet Union was prepared to go to document itsideological provenance.

24 R.G.A.S.P.I., f. 71, op. 50, d. 198, ll. 56–7. On the wood-engraver and Chartist W. J. Linton (1812–97), see J. Murdoch, ‘Linton, William James (1812–97)’, O.D.N.B. <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16745> [accessed 28 June 2007]. Lajos Kossuth was a Hungarian and Giuseppe Mazzini an Italian émigré.

25 R.G.A.S.P.I., f. 71, op. 50, d. 198, l. 95. The O.D.N.B. contains articles on the writer Thomas Allsop(1795–1880), the freethinker and radical Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (1858–1935, daughter of CharlesBradlaugh), the archivist and archaeologist Joseph Burtt (1818–76) and the Scottish soldier and journalistAlexander Somerville (1811–85). No letters from Joseph Burtt are to be found in the Adams papers today. OnJoseph Cowen, see now Allen. Adams’s lifelong friendship with James Glover began when they were bothyoung radicals in Cheltenham. Alfred Talandier was a French revolutionary. As mentioned in the text, EdwardTruelove was the publisher of W. E. Adams’s 1858 pamphlet on tyrannicide.

26 R.G.A.S.P.I., f. 71, op. 50, d. 199, l. 22.