Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Edward Carpenter 359/94
Archive	Sheffield Archives, Archives & Local Studies, Sheffield
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	19 February 1909
Address From	Matjesfontein, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions

The manuscript of this letter by Olive Schreiner belongs to the Archive referenced above; its ownership of the original should be acknowledged by referencing the letter as indicated: Copyright transcription: © Olive Schreiner Letters Project. This transcription can be freely used as long as copyright is acknowledged and it is referenced using the following citation: ‘Olive Schreiner to Edward Carpenter, 19 February 1909, Sheffield Libraries, Archives & Information, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the Sheffield Archives, Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information Services, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Archive Collections.

1:  Matjesfontein
2:  Cape Colony
3:  Feb 19 / 09
4: 
5:  Dear Edward
6: 
7:  You are an absolutely wicked boy! I did send those two photographs to
8:  Bob. - I paid 5/- each for them as they are large ones, & I had I had
9:  only a couple. I did send you a copy of my article. It wasn’t a
10:  pamphlet it was a news paper. I suppose you are so superior at
11:  Millthorpe, you just throw news papers into the wastepaper basket
12:  without troubling to look at them! (Had him there!)
13: 
14:  Con Lytton cabled to me yesterday that she had made arrangements for
15:  its coming out in the form of a small book so I’m writing her to
16:  send a copy to you. I could send you another newspaper with it do in.
17:  But no doubt you wouldn’t deign to open it!
18: 
19:  I’m still at Matjesfontein oh so glad, so thankful to be here.
20:  It’s so peace-ful & rest-ful. I can’t write about the Closer Union.
21:  It distresses me too much. If the plans of this miserable convention
22:  are carried out we stand at the beginning of a long steady downward
23:  course of 20 or 20 years. There is no hope of even that little shred
24:  of justice to the natives there has been in years past. The Rant
25:  capitalists & the retrograde Boers are going to dominate the country.
26:  We shall have native wars which for injustice & horrors will make the
27:  Boer war seem an innocent little game: & we have no working class to
28:  fight with because our working class is the natives themselves who
29:  will have no votes, & who if they strike or move in any way will be
30:  shot down like dogs.
31: 
32:  It is all depressing me so I can’t work just now. And you see one
33:  has to be so careful how one moves or what one says lest one makes
34:  matters worse. When one thinks one is dipping one’s pen into ink one
35:  may so easily be dipping it into blood in this country.
36: 
37:  Olive
38: 
39: 
40: 
41: 

Notation
'Its coming out in the form of a small book' refers to Closer Union, which originated as a lengthy article published in the on 21 December 1908 and the Cape Times on 22 December 1908 (p.9); it appeared as a short book in 1909.