I recently found a contribution I wrote fifteen years ago for a facsimile commentary of BL, Yates Thompson MS 36, a copy of the Divine Comedy illuminated by Giovanni di Paolo for of Alfonso V, King of of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily:
La divina commedia di Alfonso d’Aragona, re di Napoli: Manoscritto Yates Thompson 36, Londra, British Library, commentario, ed. by Milvia Bollati, 2 vols (Modena: Panini, 2006).
My text was translated into Italian for publication, and in the nature of such facsimiles, it has presumably had a rather limited readership; I have therefore this week put the original English text on my Academia.edu page
here.
Much of my discussion about Henry Yates Thompson was, or will seem now, rather derivative, but I think some of it is original, so I decided to provide an extract here, in the hope that it will be of interest to some readers, concerning HYT's attitude to America and Americans.
The following passage relates to the much-discussed matter of HYT's decision to sell most of his manuscripts at open auction, in the knowledge that many might be acquired by collectors and institutions in the USA:
An interesting aspect
of the proposed sale that has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned
before, is Yates Thompson’s attitude towards American versus
British owners of manuscripts. On hearing that Yates Thompson had
decided to auction his manuscripts, M. R. James appealed to him that,
having been brought together safely in an English collection, they
should not ‘be dispersed again among Boches, Jews and
Transatlantics.’ [1]
Cockerell displayed similar, if less strongly expressed, sentiments
when he wrote begging Yates Thompson to ‘give me the chance of
raising the money and securing them for the country and Cambridge …
I will at least try my utmost to save them from the hands of ignorant
millionaires’. [2]
Yates Thompson would have been completely unmoved by these
nationalistic appeals. Neither James nor Cockerell had been to
America, but Yates Thompson loved the country and had been there many
times: he first spent six months there in 1863, concluding that ‘If
ever a nation deserved to live it is the United States of America’; [3]
he went again in 1866 to re-visit the friends he had made, taking his
younger brother with him; he took his wife there soon after their
marriage (her great-grandfather was from Virginia); and he and his
wife were known for their hospitality to Americans in London: his
obituary in The Times noted that ‘He became the warm friend
of each succeeding American Ambassador in London and welcomed to his
house in Portman Square all Americans of any intellectual standing
who found their way there – and most of them did.’ The Yates
Thompsons counted among their friends Henry James, Henry Adams, and
Andrew and Louise Carnegie. ‘He always loved the company of
Americans and after 1863 he returned to America again and again right
up to the time of the 1914–18 war’. [4]
In an attempt to make America better understood in England Yates
Thompson even offered to endow an annual Lectureship at Harvard on
the ‘History and Political Institutions of the United States of
America’, but the offer was turned down by Cambridge University,
where the lectures would have been delivered.
When, in 1920,
Cockerell told Yates Thompson that he was just about to make his
first visit to America, Yates Thompson replied:
‘What
excellent news! It is an episode of importance in your life. You will
come back Americanised—in a good sense—especially [because] you
will teach the British world how absurd their craze is for retaining
all art and history treasures in England, when the truth is that such
as they manage to secure will be quite as much or more valued and
cared for in America than here.’ [5]
