Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape is significant here as the publisher whose intervention brought T. H. White’s reluctant hawking manuscript into print. Through Wren Howard’s discovery of the pages at White’s home on Alderney, the publisher becomes the agent of a change White had not intended: a private, embarrassing account of training a lost hawk becomes a published book, open to judgment from readers.

A manuscript found on Alderney

In March 1949, Wren Howard travelled to Alderney to stay with White, who had made his home there as a refuge from the taxman and the wider world. At White’s three-storeyed house in St Anne’s, Howard sat on a sofa and found it uncomfortable. Looking beneath a cushion, he uncovered a thick pile of papers: White’s manuscript about hawks.

White explained that he did not want the work published. Since writing it, he had become a skilled falconer and an authority on the subject, and the manuscript contained things he found embarrassing in retrospect. The hawk in its account had also been lost. Its appearance beneath the sofa cushion made the manuscript’s status tangible: it was not being offered to a publisher, but had been put out of sight in White’s own home.

Howard’s case for publication

Howard read the opening pages, became intrigued, and took the manuscript upstairs to read through the night. The next morning he insisted on taking it back to London because he believed it should be published. White resisted, but Howard and his friends continued to persuade him over the following weeks. White eventually consented on the condition that he could add a postscript explaining, in light of his later experience, how he ought to have trained the hawk.

The arrangement preserved a tension at the heart of the book’s publication. Howard championed a manuscript White regarded as compromising, while White’s condition allowed him to set his later expertise beside the earlier account. Jonathan Cape’s contribution, as presented in this episode, was therefore not simply to issue a text: through Howard’s persistence, the book appeared with White’s retrospective qualification attached.

Publication and reader response

The Goshawk (book) was published by Jonathan Cape in 1951. It did not become a bestseller, but it elicited an extraordinary number of letters. Responses ranged from congratulations to unusual offers, including one reader’s offer of an eagle, while some readers disliked the book intensely.

One critical letter stayed with White. Its writer, who said he had lectured on birds for thirty years and watched them throughout his life, condemned White’s treatment of predatory birds as torture and questioned whether affection for a bird could coexist with it. White later said the letter affected him so strongly that he could not eat for three days. He answered at length with affection, apology, and explanation, then waited for a reply. When the writer responded by repeatedly invoking normality and saying he did not want further contact, White chose to leave the exchange there. The sequence shows how Jonathan Cape’s decision to publish carried the manuscript into a public argument over the difference between professed love for a bird and the methods used to train it.