George Allen & Unwin Ltd., founded by Stanley Unwin in 1914, was BR’s chief British publisher, had published Principles of Social Reconstruction in 1916, and was in the process of publishing Roads to Freedom (1918) while BR was in Brixton.
This edition of Russell’s prison letters is fully annotated with letter images and reliable texts — the texts edited anew in the case of the few letters already published. The texts are printed as Russell wrote them. There are exceptions for clarity: the expansion of lower-case abbreviations, italics for some logical symbols, italics or quote marks for publications, and correction of misspelled words that aren’t names (mistakes in names can be important). See the textual notes and images for individual letters. Sources are given for the originals of the letters edited here, as well as citations of any previous publications thereof.
There are three frequently appearing bibliographical references: “Papers” is The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 18 vols. to date); “Auto.”, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967–69); “SLBR”, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. N. Griffin, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1992, 2001).
Edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew G. Bone, Nicholas Griffin and Sheila Turcon. Arlene Duncan, editorial assistant and typesetter. Student research assistants: Geneva Gillis, Graeme Lavender, Jaskaran Basuita.