Michael Taylor ([log in to unmask]) and Lyall Anderson ([log in to unmask]) have been considering the fate of Hugh Miller’s manuscripts as part of a wider study of his collections. Absurdly few MSS survive, given his literary output; some are in the National Library of Scotland, and his letter-book for the years to 1840 survives in New College Library (University of Edinburgh).
Seemingly, the bulk of Miller’s papers went to Australia with, or sent to, his daughter Harriet (1839-1883; herself a significant early Australian writer) and her husband the Rev. John Davidson (1834-1881) on his ‘call’ to become minister at Chalmers Church, Adelaide; he later became a founding professor at the University of Adelaide. They apparently intended a biography, presumably to replace the badly flawed Life and Letters of Hugh Miller (1871) written by Peter Bayne under the supervision of Harriet’s mother Lydia. Those papers included, for instance, an extensive correspondence with Robert Dick of Thurso, the geologist and naturalist, as Smiles complained in his 1878 biography of Dick. In the event, the Davidsons died early, Harriet in 1883, and their three daughters came back to the UK, while their only son worked up country as a surveyor.
Those papers were soon noted as missing, in W. K. Leask’s Hugh Miller (1896) and again in 1902 in The centenary of Hugh Miller being an account of the celebration held at Cromarty on 22nd August, 1902 (Glasgow University Press) and press reports of the event.
A few papers turned up in the hands of an Adelaide dealer and were mostly sold in 1960 to the National Library of Scotland (but most NLS Miller MSS are in fact on deposit from the National Trust for Scotland’s Hugh Miller’s Cottage and Museum at Cromarty). A very few more are in the University of Adelaide library. But the bulk of Miller’s papers remains missing. We would be interested to know of any evidence as to these Australian papers’ fate, or indeed any references in contemporary publications or MSS to Miller’s manuscripts other than those noted above.
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