Miguel de Unamuno’s British correspondencea space for sharing ideas and concerns

Resumen

This chapter deals with the letters that a number of British correspondents sent to Miguel de Unamuno and the topics they addressed in them. Unamuno was professor and rector of the University of Salamanca for many years and, crucially, in 1936 he travelled to England to receive an Honorary Degree from the University of Oxford. The first letter sent to Unamuno by a British correspondent was as early as in 1897 when Unamuno was a young professor and a budding writer. It was sent by Edward Spencer Dodgson, an expert in the Basque language who in broken Castilian introduced himself as a ‘fanatico para el Bascuence’ who had heard of Unamuno and wanted to meet him in Salamanca hoping that he was a ‘Bascongado de lengua y no solamente de raza’. It becomes obvious from a first glance of the content of the letters sent to Unamuno by the British that there is a strong presence of Spanish topics.