47454

Letter 16
BR TO GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD., 10 JUNE 1918
BRACERS 47454. ALS. Reading
Previous Brixton letter, BRACERS 46919; next letter, BRACERS 19314
Edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew G. Bone, Nicholas Griffin and Sheila Turcon

57 GORDON SQUARE,¹
LONDON, W.C.
<Brixton Prison>
10 June 1918

Messrs Allen & Unwin
40 Museum Street
W.C.1

Gentlemen

I have read this MS.² and am of opinion that it is quite worth publishing. It is very amusing, and at the same time by no means uninstructive.

Mr Jourdain knows very thoroughly the subjects which he is here treating lightly.

Yours very truly,
Bertrand Russell

Notes

• 1.

  [document] The letter was edited from a photocopy in the Russell Archives of the signed, single-sheet original in BR’s hand in the George Allen & Unwin archives at Reading University. The letter has the Governor’s initials, “CH”.

• 2.

  this MS. Of P.E.B. Jourdain’s The Philosophy of Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll with an Appendix of Leading Passages (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918). The book has two characters, the quasi-fictional B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll and his “distinguished contemporary” (p. 3), BR himself. The Editor’s Note goes on. The former, R*ss*ll, was torn to pieces by anti-suffragists in 1911. However — and shades of BR’s 1916 dismissal from Trinity College and even his 1918 imprisonment — R*ss*ll “had been forbidden to lecture on philosophy or mathematics by some well-intentioned advocates of freedom in speech who thought that the cause of freedom might be endangered by allowing Mr. R*ss*ll to speak freely on points of logic, on the grounds, apparently, that logic is both harmful and unnecessary and might be applied to politics unless strong measures were taken for its suppression. On much the same grounds his liberty was taken from him …” (p. 4).