| Description | John Southern was intially employed as an assistant to James Watt, but he soon began writing letters and answering queries and technical questions on Boulton & Watt’s behalf. The letters he dealt with were kept separately from the series of General Correspondence. How Southern originally organised these letters is not known, but the letters were usually docketed by him or another of the Drawing Office assistants. Southern’s dockets are much more sparse than those on the General Correspondence; they usually only give the name of the writer and the date. He began to add very brief summaries of the contents in the 1790s. Southern also frequently docketed by subject and not correspondent, for example various letters from Robert Mylne are docketed as “New River Head.” He also often marked letters with the date of his reply, and copies of his letters can be found in the series of Drawing Office Letter Books, and also less frequently in the Business Letter Books.
At some point the letters dealt with by Southern between from around 1788 to around 1798 were arranged into large alphabetical bundles. This may have been carried out by William Creighton, as some wrappers survive bearing his handwriting. The whole series was later assumed to cover 1788 to 1798 exactly.
Between the organisation into alphabetical bundles and the listing of the contents of the Watt Room in the 1890s, Southern’s correspondence was badly disrupted. Several letters from the General Correspondence series, particularly from the 1795-1798 series, were added to the bundles covering A to K. By contrast the bundles covering L to Z were completely dismantled. Some of their contents, particularly those letters from significant correspondents, were re-organised and filed with other letters from those correspondents, so for example the bundles of letters from John Rennie or those of letters from James Watt Jr. which were dealt with by Southern were almost certainly originally in this series. The more general letters from bundles L to Z were scattered and the majority have been lost, although some have been recovered from elsewhere in the collection. Some were found in the bundles covering A to K, where they had been placed alongside letters on similar topics. This re-arrangement may have been carried out by Henry Hazleton; certainly the draft list of the contents of the Watt Room records “10 bundles” of letters for 1788—1798, presumably the bundles covering A to K. Some of the later tinkering with the order of these bundles was carried out by the Library.
Southern’s correspondence has been restored as much as possible, although this restoration is necessarily approximate, and of course the bundles from L onwards cannot be considered as even approaching being complete. |