James Blackadder–Mortimer Cropper rivalry

James Blackadder and Mortimer Cropper’s rivalry over Randolph Henry Ash’s papers turns literary scholarship into a struggle over custody, access, and authority. Blackadder argues for keeping British writings in Britain and suspects that Cropper uses money and helpfulness to gain influence over manuscripts held by others; Cropper presents international circulation and technologically enhanced access as alternatives to possession of originals. Their conflict becomes a public contest when newly discovered letters between Ash and Christabel LaMotte promise to revise the accepted account of Ash’s life. Beneath their competing scholarly ideals lies a practical question: who will control the documents, and who will be able to tell their story?

Institutional Positions and Competing Interests

Blackadder directs the Ash research group based at the British Museum, where Ellen Ash gave many of Randolph’s manuscripts. Roland Michell works there part-time as Blackadder’s research assistant, while the project draws a small grant from London University and a much larger grant from the Newsome Foundation, of which Cropper is a trustee. Cropper’s institutional position is strengthened by his work on a major edition of Ash’s correspondence at Robert Dale Owen University and by the Stant Collection, the largest single gathering of Ash materials. The arrangement can look like cooperation in the service of Ash scholarship, but the narrator explicitly warns that this appearance is misleading.

Blackadder believes Cropper has designs on manuscripts deposited with institutions but not owned by them. In his view, Cropper works his way into the confidence of custodians through generosity and offers of assistance. Blackadder’s own position is also a national claim: as a Scot, he believes British writings should remain in Britain and be studied by British scholars. The rivalry therefore joins questions of professional trust to disagreements about national heritage and the proper location of literary archives. Cropper’s resources give him influence beyond his own collection; Blackadder’s resistance rests on custodianship, scholarship, and a conviction that the papers should not be drained abroad.

The London Library Discovery and the Contest for Custody

The dispute sharpens when Roland discovers a cache of Ash’s handwritten notes interleaved in Ash’s own copy of Vico’s Principi di una Scienza Nuova at the London Library. The volume has been undisturbed for a very long time. When its bindings are undone, faded leaves spill out: notes on Vico written on the backs of book-bills and letters, their edges darkened by soot. The fragments appear to remain in their original sequence, and the librarian cautions Roland not to disturb their order before they can be listed and described. The discovery offers a scholarly opportunity, but it also raises the immediate problem of who will secure the material and oversee its study.

Roland reports the find to Blackadder, who is eager to inspect it but first asks whether the fragments have been disturbed. Roland explains that some flew out when the book opened and that they were put back. Blackadder’s first strategic response is secrecy: he tells Roland not to let word of the discovery travel, fearing that Cropper will send money and offers of access to the Stant Collection before the London Library can protect its interests. He urges Roland to keep the matter quiet and says that patriotism will have to compensate for a lack of funding. His suspicion is sharpened by the possibility that the library might welcome a cheque while updating its facilities, whereas Cropper could gain access to the newly found material.

The scene makes the rivalry concrete through the fragile order of the archive. The notes are not merely evidence about Ash; their placement inside the book, and the librarian’s insistence on preserving their sequence, are themselves part of what must be protected. Blackadder’s concern is both interpretive and custodial: the fragments might yield important information, but their value makes them vulnerable to competing claims. His immediate priority is to prevent Cropper from getting ahead of him, even as the librarian authorizes Roland to study the notes carefully and invites him to report discoveries.

Publicity, Scholarship, and the Letters

Cropper’s public lecture, “The Art of a Biographer,” reveals a different means of establishing authority. He presents biography as a modern form of spiritual and human need, then constructs a polished, technologically elaborate show using screens, magnification, images, and projected representations of literary objects. In his argument, the historian and biographer are part of the history they interpret, not invisible observers outside it. This performance makes the scholar himself a visible component of the display, while the archive becomes material for a persuasive public narrative.

Cropper uses the lecture to announce that letters between Ash and LaMotte have been discovered. He frames the discovery through the example of newly found letters by Wordsworth, which had challenged assumptions about the poet’s marriage and compelled scholars to rewrite literary history. He says the Ash–LaMotte letters could similarly transform their field, while professing hope that they will be freely available to scholars of every nation. The announcement is both an appeal to open access and a bid to define the discovery before other scholars can present it. Cropper’s ideal of worldwide circulation is thus inseparable from his effort to become the public voice associated with the papers.

His visual rhetoric reinforces that claim. Cropper shows images of the Stant Collection and of objects associated with Ash and Ellen, including the cases preserving their woven hair and the Yorkshire rose brooch. He argues that digital representations can travel widely while original objects remain in carefully controlled conditions, and that mere possession matters less than the resources and skills to preserve fragile things. The proposition directly challenges Blackadder’s emphasis on national custody: in Cropper’s account, access can be separated from physical ownership, and technological reproduction can make an object available everywhere. Yet his own collection and his carefully staged lecture also demonstrate how control of resources can confer authority over what the public sees and how it is interpreted.

Broadcast and the Simplification of the Dispute

The rivalry changes register when Blackadder agrees to appear on television. Initially he welcomes the possibility of using broadcasting to advance his position, preparing notes on Ash, LaMotte, national art treasures, and the errors in the established account. The format unsettles him: he anticipates hostile questioning and arrives at a studio whose working environment is far removed from the scholarly setting he knows. There, Shushila Patel asks him what matters about Ash. Blackadder gives a considered account of Ash’s engagement with the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith, history, development, and the traditions of English poetry.

The broadcast compresses those arguments into a fast-moving confrontation. Leonora Stern and the other participants discuss female sexuality, the Fairy Melusina, and whether LaMotte could have loved a man; Blackadder’s contribution turns toward the newly identified beloved and the letters’ claim to national custody. He calls Ash a great love poet, identifies LaMotte as the figure behind the poems’ previously unknown passion, and insists that the letters belong in Britain as part of its national story. The contrast with his prepared scholarly case is revealing: television brings the documents to a broad audience, but encourages a sharper, more sensational framing of their implications. Cropper’s lecture and Blackadder’s broadcast are different performances, yet both show that the struggle for manuscripts also involves control of public interpretation.

Evidence, Privacy, and the Limits of Possession

The archive complicates any simple claim that ownership settles the meaning of the papers. Maud Bailey finds an unsigned, unheaded sheet in Ellen Ash’s handwriting that accuses its recipient of keeping evidence and asks that Ellen be judged more carefully. The fragment prompts competing possibilities about what Ellen retained, including whether the relevant evidence concerned a secret correspondence or a journey with Ash. Maud recognizes the danger of letting Blackadder, Cropper, or Beatrice Nest discover that she has copied the document, and signals silence to the researchers beyond the partition. The episode shows how archival evidence can be both decisive and incomplete: a surviving accusation opens questions without resolving what was kept or why.

Ellen’s account after Ash’s death makes the ethical conflict explicit. She recalls his request to burn what should not be seen and describes destroying some materials, while refusing to burn other things that were not hers to destroy. She preserves the private letters by placing them with Ash for burial, intending them to remain beyond the reach of biographical scavenging. Her choice distinguishes possession from permission: being in someone’s custody does not automatically confer the right to publish or destroy intimate documents. The papers’ later recovery turns that private decision into the very contest over access that Blackadder and Cropper embody.

When the buried container is finally opened, it yields a hair bracelet, a plaited lock of pale hair, a bundle of letters tied with ribbon, and a sealed letter addressed to Ash. Cropper identifies the bundle as the love letters; the still-unopened letter immediately raises a question about whether an undelivered message belongs to its sender or to the addressee in whose grave it lies. The discovery confirms the importance of the material that both scholars have sought, but it does not make the ethical or legal problem disappear. Blackadder and Cropper’s rivalry is finally illuminated as more than a competition between rival academics: it is a dispute over whether documents are objects to possess, evidence to interpret, private acts of communication, or parts of a national and scholarly inheritance.