Thirty-Six Unpublished Letters from William Henry Davies to Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) is largely known today as a great poet of the First World War. He also was a journalist, essayist and novelist. Thirty-six unpublished letters from the Anglo-Welsh writer William Henry Davies (1871–1940) to Thomas, now in the Hugh Walpole Collection at the King’s School, Canterbury, reveal a close friendship and Thomas’s strong support for an unknown impoverished fellow writer. In addition, the letters throw much light on the Edwardian literary scene between the years 1906 and 1909, and Davies and Thomas’s activities and interests. Davies’s letters complement existing published correspondence between him and Thomas and go some way to revise the perception that Davies took advantage of Thomas, himself at the time also a struggling writer.