A pleasing association copy, uniting two English poets and good friends, on the periphery of the Bloomsbury group.
A “cameo [and] elusive” figure in accounts of the Bloomsbury group, the English poet and translator Robert Calverly Trevelyan (1872–1951) published a significant number of his well-received volumes with the Hogarth Press, leading J H Willis to refer to him as the “most published, if not the most distinguished, poet among the Hogarth Writers” (see Davidson, 2022). Known as Bob to friends, the poet and pacifist was well connected in intellectual circles and particularly close to Roger Fry, with whom he’d shared rooms at Cambridge, the philosophers George Santayana and Bertrand Russell, as well as his inscribee, Oliver Lodge (1878-1955). The artist-poet lived with his second wife and fellow artist (and inscribee) Diana Uppington on Trevelyan’s estate in Forest Green, Surrey from 1932 to 1938. Trevelyan and Lodge likely met at Bloomsbury group gatherings, when the latter moved to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, following the death of his first wife, Wynlane, in childbirth in 1922.
With printed dedication: “To Irene Cooper Willis”
Claire Davidson (2022) ‘Robert Calverly Trevelyan’ in The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Letters to Correspondents K–Z, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press