Professor Blackadder

Professor Blackadder is a stringent Ash scholar and editor whose authority rests on decades of work on Randolph Henry Ash, but whose professional life is shaped by an early act of silence and by a modern archive’s competing claims. As head of the Ash Factory, he supervises Roland Michell and works to keep Ash’s manuscripts under British scholarly control; as the new letters emerge, that responsibility becomes a test of how scholarly ideals withstand funding pressures and rivalry with Mortimer Cropper.

Identity and Career

Blackadder is fifty-four, the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry by the fireside, including Ash’s Ragnarök, and Blackadder entered Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis impressed upon serious students both the importance of English literature and the difficulty of making a meaningful contribution to it. Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Leavis’s judgments, and burned them; in scholarship he adopted a Spartan style marked by brevity, equivocation, and impenetrability.

His defining early encounter with Ash came during a Cambridge seminar on poetic dating. The handout included a range of forms and styles, and Blackadder recognized them as examples of Ash’s remarkable ventriloquism. He could have identified their common authorship, but instead stayed silent while Leavis led the students toward mistaken attributions and demonstrated his own critical acuity. Ash was judged and found wanting. Blackadder felt he had betrayed the poet, though the episode also exposed his failure to speak when his knowledge mattered.

He answered that failure by making Ash the center of his career. Blackadder wrote a PhD on conscious argument and unconscious bias in Ash’s dramatic poems, becoming an expert when Ash was unfashionable. In 1959 he was persuaded to edit the Complete Poems and Plays, with the blessing of the present Lord Ash, who inherited the unsold manuscripts. Blackadder initially thought the edition would be finite and would lead to other work; the project instead became the defining labor of his professional life.

The Ash Factory and Its Institutional Stakes

By 1986 Blackadder directs the Ash Factory, based in the British Museum and devoted to editing Ash’s work. The project operates amid paper slips, files, index cards, typewriters, and micro-readers; its archival labor depends on assistants and researchers as well as on Blackadder’s own editorial authority. Roland works there part-time, having completed a PhD under Blackadder’s supervision, an experience described as discouraging. Blackadder is a stringent scholar, but his standards can also discourage others.

The Factory’s funding makes its institutional position uneasy. A small grant comes from London University and a much larger one from the Newsome Foundation, whose trustee Mortimer Cropper is also Blackadder’s scholarly rival. Blackadder suspects Cropper wants manuscripts deposited in the British Library but not owned by it, and believes Cropper uses financial generosity to win the confidence of their owners. For Blackadder, British writings should remain in Britain and be studied by British scholars. The funding relationship may look cooperative from outside, but it conceals a conflict over access, ownership, and influence.

That conflict becomes concrete when Toby Byng reports that an unnamed client is considering a valuation of roughly fifty long letters from Ash to an unidentified woman. The client will not disclose the letters or identify themselves, yet an offer of six figures has already been mentioned; Cropper, Blackadder learns, has also been there. Blackadder objects that he cannot responsibly value material unseen and fears that the Factory could not match Cropper’s resources. He connects the inquiry to Roland’s visits to Maud Bailey, recognizing that the new correspondence may have altered the balance of the manuscript contest before he has seen it.

Encounters with Researchers and the Archive

Blackadder’s authority is not simply administrative: it affects what questions can be asked of the papers and who gets to ask them. Beatrice Nest, who has been assigned Ellen Ash’s journal, recalls that Professor Bengtsson considered a dissertation on Ash’s Ask to Embla unsafe ground and favored the manageable, useful project of editing Ellen’s journal instead. Nest therefore worked among letters, household records, daily journals, and more private writings, hoping for intimacy with the mind behind the poems. The episode places Blackadder’s Ash-centered institution within an academic culture that channels research through approved, manageable projects.

When Maud asks to see Ellen Ash’s journal, Nest describes a previous researcher, Leonora Stern, who had pursued the possibility that Ellen’s sexual relationships might be concealed in metaphors or omissions. Nest resists the presumption that any gap must conceal sexual evidence. Maud agrees that scholarship can question almost everything except the centrality it gives sexuality, while acknowledging the difficulty feminism faces in avoiding that emphasis. Nest smiles and hands her the journal. The exchange shows that access to an archive involves not only custody of documents but also disagreement over the interpretive habits brought to them.

After Maud discovers evidence she wants copied, she asks Nest for Xeroxes of two letters and for a copy of the relevant journal entries, requesting that Blackadder and Cropper not yet be told. Nest worries that the discovery could expose Ellen to ridicule or misapprehension. Maud replies that Ellen is not the primary subject of the research, but Nest remains unconvinced and only reluctantly agrees to trust her. The episode makes the ethical cost of archival discovery explicit: scholarly excitement can put a dead person’s privacy and reputation at risk.

Competition, Ownership, and Significance

The ownership dispute reaches a more formal stage when Euan MacIntyre explains the position at a meeting attended by Blackadder, Maud, Roland, and others. Physical letters belong to their recipients, while copyright remains with their senders. Christabel LaMotte had requested the return of her letters, and Ash had complied; Maud and Roland, having seen the correspondence, can attest to that history. MacIntyre says that LaMotte’s will left her manuscripts to Maia Thomasine Bailey, Maud’s ancestor, and that Maud’s father later gave the inherited manuscripts to Maud, who deposited them in the Women’s Resource Centre at Lincoln.

This account complicates the assumption that Sir George Bailey owns the letters and clarifies why an offer from the Stant Foundation cannot settle the matter by price alone. Maud has not yet told her father about the discovery, and MacIntyre believes he is unlikely to sell to the foundation given Maud’s wish to keep the documents in the country. Blackadder’s commitment to British custody therefore intersects with Maud’s inheritance and with the distinction between ownership of the physical papers and copyright in their contents. The manuscripts are not merely objects for an editor to arrange: their custody is shaped by prior requests, a will, family gifts, and competing scholarly ambitions.

Blackadder’s trajectory joins personal inhibition to professional persistence. The young scholar who could not speak when Ash was misjudged becomes the editor charged with defending Ash’s work and negotiating access to its material record. Yet the new correspondence unsettles the orderly authority of an edition: it raises questions about who may see the papers, how they should be interpreted, and whose resources will determine where they remain. His role is consequently both editorial and institutional, positioned between the discipline of scholarship and the struggle to possess its evidence.