A collection of letters written by poet T.S. Eliot to a godson sold at auction Tuesday for $82,300 US, auctioneer Bonhams said.
The series of 50 letters to Thomas Faber, a member of the Faber and Faber publishing family, includes poems and illustrations that formed the basis of Eliot’s 1939 children’s book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was dedicated to Faber. It went on to inspire the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.
One letter is a verse Invitation to All Pollicle Dogs & Jellicle Cats To Come To The Birthday Of Thomas Faber, sent just before Faber’s fourth birthday in 1931. It opens: “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats!/ Come from your Kennels & Houses & Flats…”
In another, Eliot described the delights of Chicago: “I lecture and the folk seem easily pleased. I give a ’seminar,’ nobody knows what about. I read poetry aloud. I go to cocktail parties, dinners and lunches. It is a terrible life…”
The collection had been valued at between $45,000 and $54,000. One buyer bought the entire set, Bonhams spokeswoman Josephine Olley said, but she declined to identify the purchaser.
Eliot, who died in 1965, worked for many years as an editor at Faber and Faber and eventually became a director of the firm.
Thomas Faber became a Cambridge University physicist and died in 2004.
The auction included 84 other letters from Eliot to Tom’s mother Enid Faber, which sold for $99,620 to a different bidder, Olley said, without identifying that purchaser.
The sale also featured a signed first edition of The Waste Land, inscribed to Tom Faber’s father, Geoffrey, that was bought for $58,500, and other first editions.

Posted: 09|21|05 at 8:04 am. Filed under: UK News.