Introduction

R. C. Trevelyan, known to his friends simply as ‘Bob’, is one of the many elusive figures of the Bloomsbury Group, so often to be encountered in the margins of others’ tales, letters and diary jottings, yet so rarely to be the focus of their – or more contemporary critics’ – interests. Likewise, as is so often the case with these more cameo figures, he proves to be yet another of the fascinating gathering of intellectuals and artists in London in the early years of the twentieth century. ‘Bob’ came from a respected family of senior civil servants and barristers but broke the tradition after studying Classics and Law by choosing to become a poet. He published a number of well-received volumes as well as a large number of translations, a significant number of which were for the Hogarth Press. J. H. Willis even claims that he was ‘the most published, if not the most distinguished, poet among the Hogarth Writers’. He was the older brother of the better-known social historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, and like his brother, a former Apostle who first met Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Thoby Stephen when they were students at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was particularly good friends with Roger Fry, with whom he had shared rooms during their Cambridge years, but also with the philosopher George Santayana and his fellow thinker, Bertrand Russell, both of whom, of course, connect in their different ways to KM.

Trevelyan was an outspoken pacifist in World War One and applied for non-combatant status, which was granted, enabling him to work instead for a Quaker mission based in Paris which took care of the protection of books and manuscripts, the provision of a well-stocked lending library for refugees, and practical material support for refugee and exiled writers. His Pterodamozels, which inspired the one, co-signed letter below, is a direct and highly successful testimony to this ethical commitment, but it also bears witness to his artful, sharp and mischievous wit. Subtitled ‘An Operatic Fable’, The Pterodamozels is a verse-play, classical in structure but a biting satirical fantasy in terms of genre.