Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780) was the last crown-appointed civilian governor of Massachusetts. During his term of office, he dealt with the aftermath of both the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts has recently published the first volume of his selected correspondence covering the years 1740–1766. It is most readily available through amazon.com. Here are a few thoughts about the process of documentary editing by John Tyler, one of the volumes’ two co-editors.

The effort to bring Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s letters into print has a long history, much longer than the twenty years that I have been working on them. In 1951 and 1954, the National Historical Publications Committee at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts urged their publication. Later in the decade, Malcolm Freiberg and Catherine Shaw Mayo began transcribing the nearly 1,800 letters contained in Hutchinson’s letter books at the Massachusetts Archives. These transcriptions were an invaluable aid to anyone researching the Boston politics of the fifteen years before the American Revolution.

In 1990, when I became Editor of Publications at the Colonial Society, and thanks to the efficiency of my predecessor Fritz Allis, I had the luxury of casting about for worthy projects to publish. Discussion quickly centered on the Hutchinson Papers, but who would edit them? I naively volunteered. After all, I was a historian; I worked with deciphering historical manuscripts all the time. What could be so hard about preparing them for publication, especially given the enormous head start that Freiberg and Mayo had already given us? Bernard Bailyn, who was present at the meeting, sagely asked if I was willing to devote the rest of my scholarly career to the project.

And indeed he was right. Here we are 24 years later just bringing out volume one. That the first volume took so long is partly the consequence of the fact that Elizabeth Dubrulle and I needed to teach ourselves the arcana of documentary editing, but the delay really was caused by the fact that in addition to my part-time job working as editor for the Colonial Society, I was already fully employed as a history teacher at Groton School. Thus, the best I could do was pick up and put down the task as time allowed. Now that I am retired from teaching, I hope volumes 2, 3, and 4 will go much more quickly.

During the 20 long years it took to complete Volume 1, Elizabeth Dubrulle held the project together as we moved from paper files in triplicate to floppy disks to thumb drives to the Cloud. Elizabeth also has a keen eye, which I do not, for consistency of detail, something that is absolutely essential to a documentary edition. Policies, once established, need to be followed. Over time, Elizabeth, who knew little about Hutchinson at the outset, developed good instincts about his ways of thinking and patterns of speech, and there were any number of instances where she would encourage me to rethink a footnote – and I would have to admit that she was right.

What is the appeal of being a documentary editor? On occasion, there is the excitement of carefully unfolding a letter or document written over 250 years ago, but for the most part Elizabeth and I work with photocopies or files on a computer. Only rarely is it necessary to travel to the Archives of the Commonwealth on Columbia Point to ponder some particularly illegible word. The pleasure of editing historical documents involves being able to enter into the past without being encumbered by all the history that has been written about either people or events since they first occurred.

This summer as I was working on Hutchinson’s correspondence from 1767, I stumbled across a letter from Israel Mauduit who was then acting as the agent for the Massachusetts Assembly in London. Mauduit himself had been reading the printed letters of a number of historical figures who were principal actors during the Elizabethan period and the years leading up to the English Civil War. He knew Hutchinson, who had just completed the second volume of his History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, would share his enthusiasm about the experience: “By seeing the Accounts of Affairs while they were yet depending, and then existing only by design,” he wrote, “you feel the same kind of suspence and anxiety about Events as those men were agitated with, who were then Living, and to whom those Event[s] were future and Uncertain.”

The idea that a letter might involve something more than obligatory thanks to distant relatives for an unwanted gift first struck me in high school. My English teacher had assigned some of the essays of E. B. White as a model of spare but stylish modern American prose. I enjoyed them so much that one day, while prowling the aisles of a used bookstore, I bought a collection of his letters. I was smitten. How my heart would have pounded if there had been a letter in my mailbox with the return address “Brooklin, Maine.”

Later on, during a summer job, I was staying in an above-the-garage apartment in a town on the New England coast where there was a complete set of the Letters and Diaries of Harold Nicolson. I read my way through them all that summer (no small undertaking!), and they in turn led to the Letters of Virginia Woolf. And so I was off exploring the back streets of Bloomsbury (they were indeed a remarkably self-documenting lot!), and thus encountered other master letter writers like Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. And although my own letters or those of my correspondents were never as deliciously gossipy or as venomous, I began saving the letters I received and copies of the ones I wrote, a collection that persisted long into the days of email.

Reconstructing history through old letters requires a good dose of imagination and empathy. But gradually you begin to know (or think you know) your subject and his correspondents. After all, eighteenth century Boston was a remarkably small place: only 15,000 people, three-quarters of whom would have been women and children and, therefore – given the unenlightened attitudes of the times – not actors on the political stage. And despite generous property requirements, only a fraction of adult males could vote. It really was just a small town.

To essay concludes here.