SOURCE: "Quill and Olive Branch: Walter Besant Corresponds with Brander Matthews," in Columbia Library Columns, Vol. XLI, No. 1, November, 1991, pp. 13-22.

In the following essay, Colby documents the collaboration between Matthews and Walter Besant, founder of the British Society of Authors, as they attempted to secure transatlantic copyright protections for British and American writers and to make the work of American writers familiar in England.

From December 1894 through December 1895 there appeared in the Author, organ of the British Society of Authors, edited by Walter Besant who had founded the Society in 1883, a column entitled "New York Letter." These contributions at first were signed Hallett Robinson, shortened subsequently to H. R., a pseudonym adopted by Brander Matthews (by then a professor of literature at Columbia), as revealed in letters from Besant to Matthews in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

These twenty-nine letters, spread out in time from 1884, the...