Three Autograph Letters and One Typed Letter, signed.

Bookseller Notes

A group of letters to the same correspondent, one Tom Garnett, that span the duration of Snowden's second stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer - and this at the outset of a period of severe economic crisis.Each of the envelopes is addressed to 'Tom Garnett Esq.'; the recipient was a cotton manufacturer and prominent Trade Unionist from Clitheroe, sometime Chairman of the Free Trade League in Manchester, who in his latter years (as here) resided in St Leonards-on-Sea. Snowden's references to both his own and his correspondent's wife convey a degree of familiarity, and the two were of the same generation and evidently with similarities in outlook. Garnett, born in 1857, died two years after the last of these letters. Snowden, out of favour and his later years coloured by various disputes, lived until 1937.The first of the letters, halfway through July 1929, thanks his correspondent for his 'good wishes', these presumably in relation to Snowden's appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ramsay Macdonald's Labour Government which he frankly acknowledges is 'a horrendous job, but I will try to make the best of it'. Snowden continues with the comment that the question of Protectionism, dealt 'a shattering blow', has left 'the Tory party [...] rent asunder'. The second letter, typed, acknowledges Garentt's congratulations of a more personal kind, in respect of the Snowdens' Silver Wedding anniversary, returning the good wishes in the hope that the Garnetts may reach their Golden Wedding in good health. In the third, he considers the question of Malta, then in a period of instability due to conflict between the Catholic Church and the ruling Constitutional Party (aligned with Labour): 'the assumptions of the Papacy remain unchanged from the days when Boniface VIII made the audacious claim to the feudal lordship of Scotland' suspecting in the present case that wider Italian interests are at work. By the time of the final letter, a simple expression of gratitude for 'your very kind letter', Labour are out of power replaced by the First National Government and Snowden out of a job (as well as in poor health); he had resigned as Chancellor in September 1931, was made a peer and moved across to the House of Lords as 1st Viscount Snowden, where he served as Lord Privy Seal.The letters are from a period of great difficulty and crisis, and the political hostility and economic challenges of his second stint as Chancellor left Snowden somewhat embittered. The letters are supplemented by a quantity of clippings concerning Snowden collected by Garnett covering the same period these largely from the Manchester Guardian, one from the Sunday Chronicle and one from a French newspaper.