Pennington
Sir: Christopher Hawtree'S speculations about the authorship of Peterley Harvest (Books, 6 April) were wide of the mark. Richard Pennington certainly exists. In the early 1920s he graduated from Birmingham University's Honours School of English, which Ernest de Selincourt's exacting sylla- bus and standards had made one of the best, perhaps the best then, in Britain (F. P. Wilson was another of its graduates). While an undergraduate Pennington already displayed a range and variety of interests, including calligraphy, typogra- phy and art, which remained and have borne final fruit in his monumental Cata- logue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar (CUP, 1982).
I have not read Peterley Harvest, but
Hawtree's account of its content, and what I know of its author's career, indicate that it is largely, perhaps wholly, disguised autobiography. Pennington has for many years made his home in France.
I. A. Shapiro
The Shakespeare institute, University of Birmingham, Birmingham
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