| Description | Miscellaneous General Correspondence, 1846—1862 (5 items).*
Miscellaneous items of general correspondence from 1846 to 1870. Hardly any correspondence survives from the firm’s last years as Boulton Watt & Co. from 1843 to the death of James Watt Jr. in 1848, and the period when it was called James Watt & Co., from 1848 to the closure in 1895. What happened to this later 19th century correspondence is not known. It is possible that the majority of the firm’s correspondence was kept in the London office during this period, and that it was disposed of when the London office closed. It is also possible that it remained at Soho Foundry and was passed to W. & T. Avery in 1895 when George Tangye bought the firm’s “historical” records, and was disposed of when it was of no further use to Avery’s. No record has been found of how the firm kept its correspondence in this later period.
These few surviving items were found scattered throughout the collection. The survival of the memorandum about Watt’s patents and the letter from the editor of the Times is almost certainly due to their contents. The survival of the other items appears accidental. |