Charles Hamilton Sorley: Memorial volume compiled by his parents Professor William Sorley and Mrs Janetta Sorley
Scope and Contents
This collection, comprised of a bound volume and a folder of loose material, has been catalogued following the original pagination (marked in pencil) in the following order: MS Add.10156/1 (pages 1-28 of the bound volume) contains an index to publications and extracts from reviews of ‘Marlborough and other Poems’, 1916-18 with some items of related correspondence; MS Add.10156/2/1-26 (pages 29-59) contains letters of appreciation to Professor and Mrs Sorley of Charles Sorley’s poems, including three loose interleaved letters from E. B. Osborne, 1916-25 (page 38); MS Add.10156/3 (pages 61-91) consists of extracts from published reviews of E. B. Osborne’s ‘The Muse at Arms’ and ‘The New Elizabethans,’ also reviews of subsequent editions of ‘Marlborough and other Poems’ and ‘The Letters of Charles Sorley,’ 1917-30; MS Add.10156/4, at page 93 of the volume, contains material relating to a memorial service held at King’s College, Cambridge, on 2 November 1918; MS Add.10156/5 (pages 94-99) includes early poems of Charles Sorley published in ‘The Marlburian’, 1912-13, together with transcripts of poems and additional notes made subsequently by his father, also, ‘In Memoriam. Captain C. H. Sorley,’ in ‘The Marlburian’, 24 November 1915; MS Add.10156/6/1-9, loose un-paginated letters, enclosed at the rear of the bound volume, to Professor and Mrs Sorley, transcripts and papers relating to their son and a possible memorial, 1916-46; MS Add.10156/7, a separate folder of miscellaneous loose un-paginated material comprising review articles, 1915-24, including duplicates, not included in the bound volume, later material including a sermon preached by Dr John Wilson Baird, 1952, copies of chalk drawings of Charles Sorley (1916) and his father (1917), photographs of his parents taken in the 1920s, and a catalogue of an exhibition on Charles Sorley, Cambridge Central Library, 1986.
Pencil annotations with biographical information were written in the bound volume and on some of the loose papers by Ursula Bickersteth to assist Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who wrote and edited several works on Sorley: ‘Charles Hamilton Sorley: a Biography’, 1985; ‘The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley’, 1985; ‘The Collected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley’, 1990.
Dates
- Creation: 1912-1986
Creator
- Sorley, William Ritchie, 1855-1935 (philosopher) (Person)
- Sorley, Janetta Colquhoun (Mother of Charles Hamilton Sorley) (Person)
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for consultation by researchers using the Manuscripts Reading Room at Cambridge University Library. For further details on conditions governing access please contact mss@lib.cam.ac.uk. Information about opening hours and obtaining a Cambridge University Library reader's ticket is available from the Library's website (www.lib.cam.ac.uk).
Biographical / Historical
The poet Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915), born in Old Aberdeen, was the son of William Ritchie Sorley, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, and Janetta Colquhoun Smith, daughter of George Dunlop Smith. A boy (not a chorister) at King’s College Choir School, Charles Sorley was later educated at Marlborough College (1908-13) where he wrote and published poetry in ‘The Marlburian’. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1913. He spent six months in Germany prior to the outbreak of the First World War and, upon his return, was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the 7th battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, in August 1914. His experiences in France led him to take up writing poetry again. Promoted to full Lieutenant in November 1914 and Captain the following August, he was killed in action at the Battle of Loos on 13 October 1915, aged twenty.
His father began to compile a memorial book following the publication by Cambridge University Press (CUP) of a posthumous collection of Charles Sorley’s work, ‘Marlborough and other Poems’. This was a critical success which went to four editions between 1916 and 1919. In 1916 a limited edition was privately printed of his ‘Letters from Germany’, consisting of 60 numbered copies. This was subsequently published in 1919 by CUP as ‘The Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley,’ with an introduction by Mrs Sorley and additional biographical information. Several of Sorley’s poems were included by E. B. Osborne, in his anthology of war poetry, ‘The Muse at Arms’ (1917). Sorley’s life was subsequently commemorated by Osborne in ‘The New Elizabethans’, (1919).
An exhibition of Charles Sorley’s works and memorabilia was held at Cambridge Central Library in 1986.
Extent
1 collection (1 volume and 1 folder) : Paper
Language of Materials
English
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donated in 2016 by Ursula Bickersteth, daughter of Jean Bickersteth (neé Sorley), Charles Sorley’s sister, who married Geoffrey L. Bickersteth in 1918.
Subject
- Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 1895-1915. (Person)
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Cambridge University Library Repository
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Cambridge CB3 9DR United Kingdom
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