Obituaries

PETER HOBLEY DAVISON

PETER DAVISON WAS A LOYAL AND ENERGETIC member of the Bibliographical Society. He was editor of The Library from 1971 to 1982, and a frequent contributor, willing to review any book that fell within its mandate. He also edited the Society’s centenary volume of studies, The Book Encompassed, in 1992. He was a regular attender at its meetings, intervening briskly in discussions. He was President of the Society in 1992–94, and was awarded its gold medal in 2003.

His route to such studies was unusual. His father had been a master mariner who died when he was six, and he was educated at the Royal Masonic School for boys. He left at 15, to join the Crown Film Unit at Pinewood Studios, making propaganda films to support the war effort. He learned the art of editing in the cutting rooms there. He was conscripted into the Navy in 1944, serving in the Far East. Before he left, he met his future wife Sheila Bethel at a training course at the University of Manchester. They continued to write to each other, and married in 1949. Davison had returned to the Crown Film Unit, but found it without work, so he transferred to the MGM cutting rooms at Borehamwood. Made redundant again, he resorted to freelance journalism until he got a better job in the International Wool Secretariat.

All this time he was bent on improving on the education he had missed. He took and got a BA by correspondence course, following it with an MA in bibliography and palaeography. He was successively Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, lecturer at the University of Sydney, senior lecturer at Birmingham University, professor of English at St David’s University College, Lampeter, in 1973, and then at the University of Kent (1979–82), but took on a research professorship at De Montfort University, Leicester (1992–2001). He wrote extensively on play texts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period—among them The Fair Maid of the Exchange, the First Quarto of Richard III and the Folio text of 2 Henry IV—on more modern bibliographical studies, on the successive Records of Early English Drama publications, and on Jeremy Taylor. He was also interested in historic copyright problems, censorship and music publication.

But he will chiefly be remembered for his work on George Orwell, and for the complete edition of his work, published in twenty volumes and finished in 1998. He came to it almost by accident. The idea of a complete Orwell, to be published in 1984, came from Robert Gavron. This seemed possible then; the canonic works were in print with Secker & Warburg, and Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus had edited the unpublished journalism and letters in 1968. It was only when we—Angus, Davison and I—came to examine the Secker & Warburg texts that it became clear how much they had suffered over time. A further setback came when Bill Jovanovich, Orwell’s American publisher, refused to allow any new edition.

It took a long time to resolve this problem, but Davison was determined to go ahead, and with the help of Ian Angus and Sheila Davison all the texts were collected and rendered into accurate form. This colossal work included the transcription of the original manuscript/typescript of 1984, following which Davison himself painstakingly typed the whole transcribed text, including its deletions, corrections and insertions. By this time he had retired, and to augment his small pension became Secretary of Albany, the Georgian apartment building in Mayfair, a not inconvenient base from which to drive on the work. In 1998 it was all done, but he did not rest on the laurels he had so thoroughly earned. He continued to keep in touch with Orwell scholars world-wide. Sheila died in 2017, leaving her husband to the care of their three sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Peter Davison was born on 10 September 2026. He died on 16 August 2022.