| Description | A bundle of one hundred and twenty-six letters from and to James Watt.
There is a bundle wrapper with ' Dr Roebuck. 1765. 1768-1769. 1770- 1775 ', written in black ink. '109 letters' is also written in black ink, but this has been crossed through and ‘No 1 to 126 ’, written in red ink, in another hand.
The letters are numbered in red ink.
There are two smaller bundles here:
New nos. 1 to 40:
Item No. 1 is actually a piece of folded paper with 'Mr Watt's letters to Dr Roebuck 1765 to 1770', written in the hand of James Watt jr. and '38 letters and papers' added.
1 to 15 were separately wrapped by the outer bundle wrapper but there is no indication when this was done. The letters were not arranged in chronological order.
New nos. 41 to 126:
Old Nos. 40 to 126 are letters from Roebuck to James Watt.
The letters were arranged in chronological order beginning with the most recent.
Old nos 105 to 126 cover 1768 to 1769; old nos. 40 to 104 cover 1770 to 1775.
The bundles have now been listed separately as A and B, and each has been listed in chronological order beginning with the earliest, and therefore re-numbered.
The correspondent’s name and the date has been written on the letter and there are summaries of the contents of letters, 1 to 39 written by James Watt; 40 onwards written by James Watt jr .
Any summary in square brackets has been given by the cataloguer.
Many of these letters have been partially transcribed for the 'Extracts from Correspondence' in James P. Muirhead's three volume work The Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, (London, 1854). Some have been numbered at the head of the letter, in pencil, by J.P.Muirhead and this number is that of the published letter. This is given below at the end of the docket, as, for example, (Muirhead no.6). |