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  • Title
    Correspondence and Other Papers
  • Reference
    MS 165/1
  • Production date
    1937-1954
  • Creator
  • Creator History
    Thomas Sturge Moore (4 Mar 1870– 18 Jul 1944) was a British poet, playwright, author, critic and artist. Born March 4 1870 in Hastings, East Sussex to Daniel Moore and Henrietta Sturge, Moore was the elder brother of Bloomsbury philosopher G. E. Moore, and the uncle of the poet Nicholas Moore and the composer Timothy Moore. Sturge Moore had prominent Quaker ties on his mother’s side, most notably that of Joseph Sturge (1793–1859), a Victorian abolitionist and philanthropist. Moore was educated at Dulwich College from 1879 to 1884, but due to his ill health he fell behind and instead enrolled in the Croydon Art School, where he met the artist Charles Shannon. He then transferred to the Lambeth School of Art, where he became a pupil of Shannon’s partner, Charles Ricketts, who taught him wood engraving. Shannon and Ricketts introduced Moore to their connections in the London art world as well as the Vale Press, a printing press that Ricketts had founded in 1894. Moore contributed to their endeavours by translating and editing various works including plays by William Shakespeare, as well as contributing to the press’ periodical, The Dial. Taking his mother’s name to distinguish himself from the Irish poet Thomas Sturge, his first pamphlet Two Poems (1893) was printed privately, with his first book of verse, The Vinedresser and Other Poems published in 1899. After the latter caught the attention of the poet Laurence Binyon, Moore was then introduced to W. B. Yeats in the same year, with the two going on to form a lifelong friendship. Moore later designed book covers for editions of poems by Yeats. Moore married his cousin Maria Appia in 1903, with their son Daniel born in 1905 and their daughter, Henriette, born in 1907. Around this time Moore was involved in several societies, including the Society of Twelve, a group of wood engravers and lithographers in 1904, the Royal Society of Literature in 1911, and the Poetry Society in 1912. Moore also helped to found the Literary Theatre Club, with his written plays including Aphrodite Against Artemis (1901), an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1906), A Sicilian Idyll and Judith: A Conflict (1911), Medea (1920), Tragic Mothers: Medea, Niobe, Tyrfing (1920), and Mystery and Tragedy: Two Dramatic Poems (1930). Moore and his family moved from Hampstead, London to Hampshire in 1919, where he gave aesthetics classes to students at Bedales. Moore received civil-list pension in 1920 in recognition for his contribution to literature, and published The Powers of the Air and a play, Medea, in the same year. The family later moved back to Hampstead in 1927, where they held poetry readings and other gatherings in an open house on Friday evenings. Nominated in 1930 as one of seven candidates for the position of Poet Laureate, Moore’s poems were gathered and published in four volumes as The Poems of T. Sturge Moore (1931-1933), with Selected Poems following later in 1934. At the outbreak of the Second World War Moore moved to Dorking where he would produce his final publications. Moore died on 18 July 1944 after a long illness.
  • Scope and Content
    Personal and literary correspondence which is almost entirely with Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, poet and man of letters, under his pseudonym of John Gawsworth. The collection consists of papers mounted on pages numbered 105-130 originally intended for insertion into an album and loose papers.
  • Extent
    2 folders
  • Language
    English
  • Level of description
    series
  • Content person