Nick

On January 10, our class visited the Kings College Archives at Cambridge University. After exploring many of the archival documents, I developed a greater appreciation for the Bloomsbury Group as people, not just academics. I chose to focus on a letter from John Maynard Keynes to his mom regarding his sentiments toward the ongoing peace negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Versailles.

The letter was handwritten on a piece of old, coarse, creased paper that featured letterhead and logo from the British Delegation, Paris. The contents described Keynes passionate distaste in the current political climate. As a result, his mental health has greatly deteriorated. He describes this when he states, “I’ve been utterly worn out, partly by work, partly by depression of the evil around me.”1 While I had been aware of Keynes opinion regarding the treaty, I believe that his letter accentuates how truly disgusted he is. Keynes goes on to tell his mother that he plans to resign from his position at the Treasury and is in need of a holiday.

I was intrigued how this letter evolved into The Economic Consequences of Peace that we had read for our course. Keynes voices displeasure from the very beginning as he menitons, “Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century.”2 It was reported that in Keynes’s early manuscripts, he had to tone down his personal attack against the four leaders at Versailles. The letter brings truth to that, as Keynes voices hatred towards current politics.

Reading archival documents is a process and takes time to digest and understand. The handwritten nature of the letter made it difficult to read and as a result I spent more time digesting it. I began to appreciate Keynes’s personality through his writing; I almost felt intrusive as the letter was incredibly intimate and only meant to be read by his mother. Through this process, I was able to see Keynes and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group as people, rather than historical figures to be studied.