English Literature

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature collection is a fortunate blend of books collected by the Garrett family and by the Tudor and Stuart Club of John Hopkins. The Garretts owned all four Shakespeare folios, the last (1685) in its original binding, as well as three quartos, Henry V (3d edition, 1608), and The Merchant of Venice (2d edition, 1600) and The Tragedy of Hamlet (1676). Also included in the Garrett Collection are first editions of Jonson's Workes (1616), Beaumont and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies (1647), and Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620). In the Tudor and Stuart Club collection is a group of early editions of Spenser, including two variants of the first edition of the Faerie Queene (1590), and a number of works by Milton, including first editions of Paradise Lost (1668, 4th title page), and Paradise Regain'd (1671). Three editions of Chaucer's Workes (1542, 1561, and 1602) originally in the Eisenhower Library, have been added to the collection. There are also contemporary editions of Donne, Drayton, Dryden, John Heywood and others. This collection contains not only choice examples of the literature of seventeenth century England, but also examples of the writings of an English historian like William Camden, a jurist like John Selden, and men of letters like Samuel Daniel, William Warner, Sir Thomas Browne, and John Evelyn, who are all represented in various seventeenth- century editions.

Byron and Contemporaries

The 900 volumes of the Byron collection include all his works in as many editions as it has been possible to obtain. There are firsts of all major poems, later editions up into the twentieth century, translations into most European languages, parodies of Byron's works, musical settings of his poems, and books about him.

The Harry S. Dickey bequest in 1971 includes a collection of Byron's important early editions, association items and letters. Mr. Dickey was able to obtain, among other rarities, the first edition of Waltz, published in London in 1813 without the author's name on the title page. He also left the library a unique copy of Don Juan, Cantos III, IV and V, (London, 1821), with holographic corrections by the poet. Among the manuscripts in his Byron collection are eight letters written by Byron's wife; and an album kept by his sister August Leigh, in which she copied poems by Byron and others. Then years after Mr. Dickey's death, the Friends of the Library supplemented the Byron Collection by purchasing a group of 425 editions, principally collected works, assembled by a British book dealer. Additions to the collection are still being made in an effort toward comprehensiveness.

Mr. Dickey's collecting interests extended to Byron's contemporaries, and he acquired first editions of Keats, Shelley (including the poet's first published book, Zastrozzi, London, 1810), Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thomas Moore. Special Collections also holds a group of works by Leigh Hunt, purchased by the Library in memory of a former staff member.

Over 100 books by Robert Southey round out the early nineteenth century English collection. They belonged to Raymond Dexter Havens, professor of English at Hopkins, who left his library to the University on his death in 1955. Included are first and other editions of the Poet Laureate's works, a few autograph letters, and a copy of Carlyle's German Romance, (Edinburgh & London, 1827) which Southey had bound in printed cotton and gave to Wordsworth.

 Anthony Trollope

The Jacques and Suzanne Schlenger Collection includes British first editions of 29 Trollope novels from his third La Vendée to the posthumously published An Old Man's Love. Many are in their original cloth bindings and illustrated including those by J.E. Millais. The collection includes five titles issued in parts as well as thirteen American first editions and British first editions of several non-fiction titles.

Oscar Wilde Collection

The small Oscar Wilde collection, donated by Harry S. Dickey, contains six manuscripts and approximately fifty books, including Ravenna (Oxford, 1878), the Newdigate Prize Poem at Oxford, along with the author's first book and good copies of pirated editions of some of Wilde's less well known works such as the rare Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. The autograph letters include one to Wilde's publisher, John Lane, in 1893, complaining about the "dreadful" cover of the first English edition of Salome. The collection also holds the first edition of Salome in French, as Wilde originally wrote it, from a special issue of fifty copies, and the 1906 London edition in English.

There is an important copy of the first edition of The Importance of Being Earnest (London, 1899) inscribed by Wilde to his friend Ada Leverson, the "wonderful sphinx." And a fourth edition of the Ballad of Reading Gaol has one of Wilde's calling cards, with the name Sebastian Melmoth, which Wilde sometimes used after leaving prison, mounted on the dedication page after the title page.