| Description | Arrangement and provenance.
In the Catalogue of Papers compiled by William D. Brown about 1791 is listed a file under the following title:
Jas Watt. Letters 1768 to 1790
The file was probably at that time in the form of a bundle. Later its contents were divided between ? portfolios, and the present file corresponds to the first of these, the title of which was:
Jas. Watt 1768 to 1779
(This is the title as recorded in the Assay Office Inventory of January 1921, but unfortunately the portfolio was subsequently discarded.) Under M. R. Boulton's arrangement, the file was placed in Box K. I.
As a result of re-arrangement carried out while the Matthew Boulton Papers were in the custody of the Assay Office, it is impossible to be certain as to the original arrangement or composition of this file, but it is believed that the following account comes somewhere near the truth.
The composition of the file is unusual, for it contains not only (as one might expect) letters from Watt to Boulton and copies of Boulton's letters in return, but also original letters from Boulton to Watt and correspondence between Watt and William Small. It appears that these documents were placed together with Watt's to Boulton with the purpose of using them as evidence in connection with the renewal or protection of Watt's steam-engine patent; for it is clear that the letters from Boulton and Small to Watt were selected from a larger number, the residue of which remain among Watt's own papers. As these "additional" documents derive from the period before 1778, it may be conjectured that the collation was made not long after that date.
The contents of this file have been divided according to their several provenances, and are now arranged in six chronological sequences, as follows:
Letters from Watt to Boulton.
Letters from Boulton to Watt.
Letters from Small to Watt.
Letters from Watt to Small.
Letter from Jefferson to Small.
Miscellaneous Documents.
The letters from Watt to Boulton find their expected place in this file, and require no further comment with respect to their provenance.
The letters from Boulton and Small to Watt were evidently at one time with Watt's own papers, and were folded and docketed by him in his usual manner. Under the scheme of arrangement recorded in the Assay Office Catalogue the letters from Small to Watt were placed in a separate file, but it seems likely that they were not in that state when they arrived at the Office, and that the separation was made later: there is no earlier reference to a file in Small's name, and such an arrangement would in any case be rather odd; moreover, the manner in which these documents were treated or referred to in the works of Muirhead and Smiles (see below) suggests that the file was a single entity when the documents were consulted by those men.
The letters from Watt to Small were, again, of course, once in the possession of the recipient. Probably they were extracted from Small's papers at some time after his death on 25 Feb. 1775, for the single letter from Jefferson to Small probably came with them, and this did not arrive in England till months after Small's death. It may be noted that the letters from Watt to Small are docketed in the same hand as the early ones from Boulton to Watt, and that several of them also bear notes on the dockets by William D. Brown, who arranged Boulton's papers about 1791.
Under the last heading are listed a few documents of a miscellaneous nature. Most (if not all) of these were probably transferred to this file by the Assay Office, but their origins are not known.
Publication.
Many of the early letters in this file were printed in full or extracted in the first two volumes of J. P. Muirhead's work, The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt (3 vols., 1854), and the numbers assigned to the transcripts there are recorded in the corresponding entries below. These printed transcripts must be used with caution, for Muirhead does not always indicate where passages have been omitted from his transcripts. For example, the last paragraph of 1 is omitted from his printed version, but no indication of the fact is made. The documents selected by Muirhead still bear marks and annotations made by him in preparing his publication: on such documents there will normally be found a tick in ink on the docket, and a large number written in pencil at the head of the letter which was intended to correspond with the number of the printed extract, though Muirhead evidently changed his mind about the inclusion of several letters. There may also be brackets in the body of the text indicating the passages to be extracted, and other miscellaneous notes. One such note reveals that Watt's letter of 28 May 1769 was torn in two for the purpose of sending part of it away to a Mr. Brawston in order that an illustration on it might be engraved; unfortunately this letter was later repaired with the pages in the wrong order. Muirhead also amended a number of the dates on the dockets, and even occasionally the spelling.
Samuel Smiles also consulted these letters in writing his Lives of Boulton and Watt (1865) (see pp. 145-52, 186-98), and in his Preface he gave them pride of place in his description of the Boulton Papers, which he terms "the extensive collection of documents brought from Soho, including the original correspondence between Watt and Small, between Watt and Boulton, and between the latter and his numerous intimate friends and business correspondents."
Selected letters were also printed in The Selected Papers of Boulton & Watt: Volume 1, The Engine Partnership, 1775-1825 (1981), edited by Jennifer Tann.
Some of these letters, especially those from Watt to William Small are in a volume of photostat copies made 1937 - 8 by the Assay Office on the open shelves. |