Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Edward Carpenter 359/90
Archive	Sheffield Archives, Archives & Local Studies, Sheffield
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	26 October 1905
Address From	Hanover, Northern 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, 26 October 1905, 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:  Hanover
2:  CC Cape Colony
3:  South Africa
4:  Oct 26 / 05
5: 
6:  Dear Edward
7: 
8:  It was nice to see your handwriting again. The Lawrence spent some, to
9:  me very delightful, days here & have now gone up to see the Victoria
10:  Falls. On the 7th of November they return here. You can’t have any
11:  idea what the pleasure was of seeing them. I was in a sort of heaven.
12:  They have given me a book called The Souls Of Black Folk by a coloured
13:  man Burghardt Du Bois. If you’ve not read it you must get it & read
14:  it at once. Perhaps it can’t be to any you just what it is to me who
15:  for years & years have longed, "Oh that one man of dark blood would
16:  rise, who would express, not what he feels it polite & wise to say to
17:  white people, but who whould would say what he feels." Uncle Tom’s
18:  Cabin or poor little Peter Halket are all very well; but you are
19:  always met with the remark, "Yes thats how you paint the nigger, but
20:  he’s not realy like that, you put your own thoughts & feeling into
21:  him, & fancy he feels as a white man, but he doesn’t." - & what can
22:  one answer. But this book from the heart of a black man can surely not
23:  be unreadable met so. To me the most wonderful chapter is called "the
24:  passing of the first-born," where he speaks of the death of his little
25:  child, a dark child - loved so! I can’t even write of the book it
26:  touches me so. Of course it can’t be quite the same to you who have
27:  not all your life been face to face, with persistent quiet oppression
28:  & humiliation which white man deals out to dark. The book makes me
29:  feel Before us ^so^ much that sometimes I can’t look at it; it seems
30:  to come from within me.
31: 
32:  //Before us here looms a terrible thing, a great desolating native war,
33:  in which Boers & British will combine to wipe out the black man’s
34:  freedom, ^take^ his land, his franchise, where he has it, as in the Cape
35:  Colony & gain cheep labour. The Boer has not got the teeth of the
36:  Englishmen out of his flesh when he turns around to join him in
37:  tearing the the dark man to pieces. And one cannot speak - because one
38:  fears by even whispering under one’s breathe of what one sees
39:  approaching that one may bring it nearer!
40: 
41:  ^The only things of Lafcadio Hearn’s I have seen were two short
42:  articles Ellis sent me. I should like very much to have unreadable any
43:  thing of his very much indeed. Love to George & Lucy, & Mat if you see
44:  him. I sometimes hear from Isabella & the dear old Bob. ^
45: 
46:  Olive
47: 

Notation
The books referred to are: W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) The Souls of Black Folk Chicago: A.C. McClurg; Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) Uncle Tom’s Cabin Boston: J.P. Jewett. Lafcadio Hearn's articles cannot be established, while, out of his books, only Chita (1899, New York: Harper Brothers) seems to have been published before 1905.