Mortimer Cropper’s scholarly devotion to Randolph Henry Ash

Mortimer Cropper’s scholarly devotion to Randolph Henry Ash is at once a biographical vocation, a collecting campaign, and an uneasy form of self-definition. Cropper seeks to reconstruct Ash from letters, journeys, relics, and small particulars, believing that each newly recovered fragment restores something of the poet to life. Yet the more completely he documents Ash, the more his own identity seems to recede into the records; his devotion thus joins genuine intellectual care to a powerful appetite for possession and control.

Origins of the Devotion

Cropper’s attachment begins in the family collection and in a letter by Ash to his great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper. During the 1860s and 1870s, her house was a centre for spiritualist research, and Cropper later speculates that an attempt to draw Ash into that work may have prompted the letter. He cannot find Priscilla’s original letter to Ash and fears that Ash may have destroyed it. The surviving reply, however, becomes the document around which Cropper’s scholarly life gathers.

His father first gives him the handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to decipher. Cropper remembers the encounter as a physical and emotional shock: touching the paper makes the dead poet seem to reach across time. In his recollection, Ash’s energetic handwriting and the letter’s material survival matter as much as its contents. The document is not merely evidence for a biography; it is the first point of contact that gives Cropper’s later research its personal charge.

That first encounter also leads to the Stant Collection. In a sunlit room in the family home, the idea takes shape of an institution that will preserve Ash’s papers and related materials. The collection eventually occupies a central place in the Harmonia Museum at Robert Dale Owen University. Cropper’s scholarship therefore grows alongside a system for gathering, storing, editing, and regulating access to the poet’s documentary remains.

A Scholar of the Whole Life

Cropper’s ambition is to know, as far as possible, everything Ash did and everyone who mattered to him, down to minor preoccupations. He presents the small letters to Sophia Wapshott as valuable not because they transform the known story on their own, but because they add detail to a larger portrait. In Ash’s letter, an elderly correspondent thanks Sophia for drawings of ducks and drakes, praises her observation of a duckling among pond roots and grubs, and answers with a drawing of the ash tree. Cropper sees such modest exchanges as a way to bring the poet’s ordinary affections and attentiveness into view.

The same principle directs Cropper’s travels. He retraces Ash’s journeys not in a single chronological itinerary but as opportunities arise: to the North Yorkshire Moors and coast, Amsterdam and The Hague, Iceland, and other places associated with the poet. He repeats Ash’s 1859 northern walking tour in 1949, following local routes and seeking the pubs, rock formations, Roman roads, and streams that might give the poet’s experiences a physical setting. His travel is research by reenactment: places become another kind of archive, to be examined against poems and documents.

Cropper extends that method to Ash’s marriage. He reconstructs Randolph and Ellen Ash’s 1848 wedding journey, following their route by modern transport while attending to the conditions recorded in the past. For the Rhône passage, he arranges to travel on a timber-carrying cargo boat, echoing the earlier journey’s river leg. The reconstruction reveals both the scale of his commitment and his preference for evidence made tangible through repeated movement and material circumstance.

His publications and editorial interests give this collecting a public scholarly form. Cropper publishes a biography titled The Great Ventriloquist in 1969, named after one of Ash’s monologues, and supplies material for editions of Ash’s work. He disputes James Blackadder’s identification of his ancestor with a fictional spiritualist figure in Ash’s poem Mummy Possest, publishing an argument that stresses the differences. Their disagreement shows how Cropper’s investment in Ash extends from acquisition and biography to the interpretation of the poet’s texts and the reputation of people associated with him.

Collecting, Access, and Control

Cropper’s devotion is inseparable from his work to enlarge the Stant Collection. When he learns that Daisy Wapshott has inherited four letters to her husband’s mother, Sophia, he travels from London to seek them. He has spent six months cultivating contact, after a bookseller alerts him to the family’s “Grummer’s tree-letters.” Although he expects the letters might be bought for a modest sum, he recognizes that Mrs Wapshott could refuse, leaving him no further opportunity. His scholarly pursuit therefore begins not in a public archive but in a private home, where the papers remain subject to family wishes.

Cropper explains that the Stant Collection already holds the largest and finest collection of Ash’s correspondence. He argues that the Wapshott letters will add lustre and detail to the poet’s life and promises preservation under controlled conditions, with access limited to accredited scholars. This case makes visible the tension at the heart of his collecting: preservation is a real aim, but the promised safekeeping also means institutional custody and restricted access. He wants the documents not simply known, but gathered within the collection he directs and made available on its terms.

The family history behind the letters complicates any easy transfer from private inheritance to scholarly possession. Mrs Wapshott explains that her husband intended the papers for their daughter Katy, who had taught English and shown interest in the letters. The mother keeps Katy’s childhood room ready for her return and understands the papers as hers “in a sort of way—in trust.” Cropper accepts that she should consult her daughter, while emphasizing the substantial funds available to the collection. His exchange with Mrs Wapshott places money, family obligation, and scholarly preservation alongside one another without making them equivalent.

Cropper’s collecting extends beyond correspondence. He plans to bid on Ash-related materials at auction, including a needlecase traditionally associated with Ellen Ash and a ring said to contain Ash’s hair. The Stant Collection already holds several clippings of Ash’s hair from different periods of his life, including a posthumous silver lock. Cropper imagines these objects gathered in a glass room at the collection’s centre, preserved in regulated air. The vision turns scholarly custody into a carefully ordered environment where papers, bodily relics, and the scholars who study them are all housed within the institution’s design.

His desire for access can also become clandestine. Cropper has cultivated invitations to houses containing Ash manuscripts and, when owners might refuse a sale or even permission to copy, has privately photographed what he finds. In some instances, he believes, these covert images are the only surviving record of documents subsequently lost. He justifies the practice as service to scholarship, but it exposes the friction between his conservationist purpose and the consent of those who own the papers. The devotion that saves a record can also override the boundary between public research and private custody.

Biography and the Self in the Archive

Cropper’s sustained attention to Ash has a cost that the collecting itself cannot remedy. He considers writing an autobiography or family history, yet his accounts repeatedly turn back toward Ash. A record of the poet’s movements, engagements, habits, and sympathies becomes the substance through which Cropper himself tries to narrate a life. He recognizes, intermittently, that his identity can feel insubstantial, as if it has been absorbed into the written record of another man.

The pattern is especially clear in his autobiographical sketches. The transcription of Priscilla’s letter marks a high point; after it, the drafts fall away into ordinary childhood recollections or catalogues of Cropper’s later dealings with Ash’s life and work. The writing seems driven toward the original encounter with the paper, then loses force once it reaches it. Cropper senses that he has no separate existence after that first contact, though he does not fully investigate what this means.

His reticence extends to his mother. Cropper recognizes that his difficulty continuing his autobiography is connected to a prohibition against writing about her, even as he maintains a close, affectionate correspondence with her when travelling. His unfinished self-narrative thus contains a silence that his extensive Ash scholarship cannot fill. The man who wants no lost detail in his subject’s life leaves a consequential area of his own deliberately unexplored.

Legacy and Significance

Cropper’s relationship to Ash is neither a simple act of admiration nor merely a contest for ownership. He commits himself to preserving fragile evidence, follows the poet’s journeys with unusual diligence, and understands how small documents can revise the texture of a literary life. At the same time, he imagines private papers as materials that should belong in the Stant Collection, resents obstacles to access, and uses covert photography when permission may not be forthcoming. His work makes the ethical question of who may preserve, possess, and interpret a writer’s papers part of his characterization.

The devotion also shapes the novel’s contrast between archival completeness and personal knowledge. Cropper’s system gathers letters and relics into an expanding record, but documents remain dependent on family memory, inheritance, access, and chance. His own autobiographical effort, meanwhile, falters at the point where it might move beyond Ash and confront the intimate life he has not written. The archive grows; the archivist’s account of himself does not. That imbalance gives Cropper’s scholarship its force and its unease: he can make Ash more present through evidence while remaining uncertain of the life that is his own.