Harmony City is the New Mexico setting of Robert Dale Owen University and its Stant Collection, where Mortimer Cropper pursues his monumental edition of Randolph Henry Ash’s correspondence. The city’s importance lies less in a described urban landscape than in the scholarly and material power concentrated there: Ash’s scattered books and letters can be gathered, interpreted, and preserved, but that preservation also raises questions about ownership, privacy, and who controls access to the past.

Institutional Center of Ash Scholarship

The Stant Collection holds the largest single gathering of Ash’s books and papers, and Cropper describes it as the largest and finest collection of Ash’s correspondence anywhere in the world. He works there on a monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash, aiming to know as much as possible about Ash’s activities, acquaintances, and lesser preoccupations. Cropper’s research program turns seemingly minor traces into biographical evidence: even a small group of letters, he argues, can add detail and bring the historical figure more fully to life.

The collection’s reach contrasts with the physical dispersion of Ash’s books across Europe and America. By the period of the novel, scholarly materials can travel electronically, so the distance between Harmony City and other repositories need not prevent research. Yet Cropper’s ambition is not merely to consult documents: he seeks to bring them into the Stant Collection, where they can be preserved under controlled conditions and made available to accredited scholars. His preferred model combines conservation with restricted access, making the institution both a safeguard for manuscripts and a gatekeeper over them.

Acquisition, Gifts, and Custody

Cropper’s pursuit of the Wapshott family’s letters shows how the institution’s holdings depend on negotiation with private custodians. The letters, inherited within the family and known locally as “Grummer’s tree letters,” had been kept for a daughter who had taught English and cared about them. Mrs Wapshott treats them as belonging to her daughter in a kind of trust and refuses to hand them over without consulting her. Cropper, meanwhile, presents their scholarly value and the Collection’s preservation facilities, while offering an advantageous price. The exchange places family obligation, affection for the documents, financial value, and institutional custody in direct tension.

A separate chain of transmission surrounds the papers of Christabel LaMotte. After LaMotte’s death in 1890, her sister Sophia sent papers and poems to her daughter May, explaining that LaMotte had wished them to pass to her niece and hoped she would come to care about poetry. The papers remained in the family and were later deposited in an archive associated with LaMotte’s descendants. This female-line inheritance contrasts with Cropper’s effort to centralize Ash materials at Harmony City: documents move not only through scholarly markets, but also through kinship, remembered wishes, and private acts of safekeeping.

Preservation and Private Evidence

The novel repeatedly makes preservation inseparable from loss and silence. When Roland Michell finds Ash’s old notes interleaved in a copy of Vico, their position and soot-dark edges suggest that the fragments have remained undisturbed for decades. The librarian permits him to study them but insists that he preserve their sequence until they have been listed and described. Such care protects the evidence while also imposing rules on how it can be handled and interpreted.

The surviving papers do not amount to a complete record. LaMotte’s archive contains manuscripts, changing drafts of Melusina, scattered lyrics, a commonplace book, a few letters, and Blanche Glover’s diary for only three years; its custodian acknowledges that other materials may have been lost through neglect. Beatrice Nest likewise distinguishes surviving evidence from speculation about letters Ellen Ash may have burned or buried. Against this background, Cropper’s expansive ideal of recovering Ash’s whole life appears powerful but necessarily incomplete: archives preserve traces, while custodians’ choices and the gaps between documents shape what can be known.

Access, Ownership, and Interpretation

The discovery of the concealed correspondence sharpens the conflict between scholarly access and personal privacy. When Roland and Maud consider what should happen to the letters, they recognize that the papers might be valuable and could be treated as national heritage, yet Maud resists the idea of sending them to Cropper or allowing them to disappear into an American collection. Her possessiveness is not based on legal ownership; it arises from having found the letters and from understanding them as private. The distinction matters: physical possession, scholarly interest, copyright, and the ethical claim to disclose intimate correspondence do not automatically coincide.

Cropper’s promise that documents will be preserved in purified air, at controlled temperature, and under limited scholarly access gives institutional care a double aspect. The conditions protect fragile materials, but they also define who may encounter them. Harmony City therefore functions as more than a distant repository: it is the endpoint imagined by a collector whose devotion to Ash makes comprehensive possession seem like service to scholarship. The novel sets that ambition against family bequests, personal trust, and the possibility that some evidence was deliberately withheld from future readers. The city’s archival authority can preserve the past, but it cannot make preservation ethically neutral or restore everything the past has lost.