Collection search - Letters home from Oxford [textual record]

Record information – Brief
1
Letters home from Oxford [textual record]

Hierarchical level:

Series

Date:

1929-1954.

Reference:

R2207-1-1-E, MG30-E408

Type of material:

Textual material

Found in:

Archives / Collections and Fonds

Item ID number:

192163

Context of this record:

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Hugh Whitney Morrison fonds

Letters home from Oxford
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Record information – Details

Series includes:

8 lower level description(s)
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Date(s):

1929-1954.

Place of creation:

United Kingdom

Extent:

0.21 m of textual records.

Language of material:

English

Scope and content:

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The series comprises Hugh Whitney Morrison's letters home to his family in Alberta while studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. His letters home express the experiences, successes and disappointments of a perceptive young student abroad in the 1930s, discovering England and Europe through the prism of the Great Depression. He wrote often, telling his mother and sisters about his experiences in a frank and open fashion which offers a vivid portrait of student life at Oxford between the world wars. He tells of spending a day at Oxford in December 1930 with R.B. Bennett, including the Prime Minister's thoughts on the British connection and the Imperial Conference that he had just attended. Morrison wrote to his sisters about the revolution in his thinking about sex, romantic relationships, and marriage brought about by his experiences as a Rhodes Scholar. His play for the Oxford hockey team and their victorious tour of Europe in 1932 are also described by Morrison who toured the Soviet Union on his own to see the communist experiment first-hand.

The letters discuss his course of studies in English and Political Theory, including his relationships with his tutors Percy Simpson, the poet Edmund Blunden, and Idris Deane Jones. In a July 1932 letter, he relates the trials of his oral examination in English literature and language at the hands of J. R. R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His correspondence also shows the impact of the Depression on the middle class and well-educated in England and Canada. As the end of his studies loomed in 1933, the bleak economic prospects facing him after the scholarship ended weighed heavily on his mind, especially when his widowed mother's financial troubles compelled her to sell the family home. His letters home also reveal how his old friends from the University of Alberta who were in England, Lovat Dickson and Matthew Halton, helped him in the search for work.

Source:

Private

Former archival reference no.:

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MG30-E408
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Textual records

[Consultation90 Open]

Volume [MG30 E 408]

[Consultation 90 Open]

1--2;

[Consultation 90 Open]

7;

[Consultation 90 Open]

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Date modified:: 2024-07-04