In the late 1940s, when BR was going through his archives, and in the 1950s when he was revising his Autobiography, he would occasionally annotate letters. He did this to sixteen of the Brixton letters. Links to them are gathered here for convenient access to these new texts. In the annotations to the letters they are always followed by “(BR’s note.)”
Letter 2, note 5 happy.
5, note 6 congratulations to G.J.
9, note 28 bit of Girondin history.
12, note 6 friend.
15, note 2 (the letter in general).
20, note 7 G.J.
31, note 3 Dr’s treatment.
40, notes 9, 10 Ld. G.L.G, Lady B’s.
44, note 14 S.S.
48, note 48 Mother Julian’s Bird.
57, notes 13, 16 Ld. Granville’s to Ly. B., bless that Dr. … seat of intellect.
70, note 15 Mrs Scott.
73, note 12 E.S.P. Haynes.
76, note 4 Cave.
85, note 2 Marsh on Rupert.
102, notes 23, 28 Woolley, K. Lonsdale.
General Annotations
Brett note from Auto. 2: 93
Cousens note from Auto. 2: 71
Kyle note with her letters to BR
Rinder note from Auto. 2: 88n.
Silcox note on BRACERS 80365
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.
Our thanks to McMaster University Library for generously funding the development of this website for The Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell and to the Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections for providing scans of documents in its care.
Bertrand Russell’s letters © McMaster University, 2018.