I came across this lovely piece of correspondence sent to Percival Gardner-Smith by another scholar well known in our field, Edwin A. Abbott:
Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith
Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith dated Jan. 26, 1892. In the letter Abbott enclosed a circular on behalf of his sister, offering a home for young Indian children. Abbott also alludes to a "big book" he has in the press. He writes that the book will be too big to send and requests that Gardner-Smith get a copy from Mudie's.The letter is reproduced in high quality at the above link, in Brown Digital Repository. But the date given, 26 January 1892, is surely wrong. Gardner-Smith was born on 3 February 1888, so he was not even 4 years old at the time. The letter asks Gardner-Smith:
". . . to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils' parents may want a home for young Indian children."No doubt Gardner-Smith was a precocious child but he is unlikely to have had pupils, or to have been interested in "a big book in the press" that Abbott goes on to mention.
So what is going on here? The date of the letter certainly looks like 26 Jan. 92:
The only sense I can make of it is that the date is in fact 26 Jan. 12, i.e. 1912, when Gardner-Smith would have been 23, and curate of St Mark's Milverton, Leamington. But could that digit be a "1"? The loop at the top is certainly odd, but this is the way that Abbott wrote the capital "I", as in this letter:
Or from another letter, see here:
That "I" does look a bit like a "9".
These are not perfect analogies, especially as the digit drops below the line, so I'm not sure if this is the solution. But certainly a date in 1912 would work, and it is surely preferable to the idea that Abbott was writing to a three year old.
The letter features the following annotation in a different hand:
This is presumably an inference that the mentioned "big book in the press" is The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman (1892), unlikely to be of interest to a three year old. But if the letter is 1912, the book would be Light on the Gospel from an Ancient Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), a book that would certainly have been of interest to the twenty-three year old Gardner-Smith.
That's my suggestion. I wondered if it could perhaps be a different "Percival" but I can't find a friend of Abbott's other than Percival Gardner-Smith, and it may be Gardner-Smith himself who provided the letter to Thomas Banchoff, who has a lovely picture of Gardner-Smith in his eighties, also in the archive.
Update: here is my attempt at a transcription of the letter:
Braeside
Willow Road
Hampstead N.W.
26 Jan. ?12
My dear Percival,
After all good wishes, and deprecations ?fin flu ?early ?on — this is to ask you to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils’ parents may want a home for young Indian children. My sister is ?bright or motherly, and my niece is fond of children — almost to excess: so I think the little people wd be happy with them. At the same time she does not limit herself to the very young children, nor to those of Indian parents.
I hope you will hear of me again soon in the literary sphere. I have a big book in the press, so big that I shall not be able to afford to send it to you: but you must get it from Mudie’s. I think it will be interesting; I hope it will not be too irritating.
Yours ever
Edwin A. Abbott