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Research Materials in English and American Literature
This summary of the nature and holdings of the Huntington Library has
been prepared for scholars in the fields of English and American literature.
Those scholars who have not used the Library will be able to learn whether
it may be of use to them in the future. Scholars familiar with the holdings
and programs of the Library are encouraged to make this information known
to colleagues, especially younger scholars whose work may be aided in their
research by the Huntington Library's holdings.
The library is a research institution for the scholarly study of English
and American literature, history, and art. It has extensive collections
of manuscripts, rare books, photographs, prints, and ephemera, and scholars
are cordially invited to use them. In research materials for literary study,
all periods of English literature, from the medieval to the present are
represented and of American literature from the 17th century to the present.
A few notes can suggest the types of holdings, some the areas of concentration,
and other features of the Library as a research center.
English Literature Before 1900
Medieval pre-Renaissance: Middle English
MS texts, including the Ellesmere Chaucer, the Towneley Plays, the Chester
cycle, four MSS of "Piers Plowman," and four of the "Prick
of conscience," various MSS of Hoccleve, Gower, Lydgate, and Wycliffe
are included in the collection, as are many others.
15th Century: The collection includes
5,400 incunabula (several hundred of them unique in the United States)--after
that of the Library of Congress, the largest in this country.
Renaissance: The Library has
about half of the titles printed in England before 1641, with an additional
3,000 works available in photocopies or microfilms. It has about 95 percent
of all English plays and masques in one or more early editions. The MS
collections include holograph plays; writings of Sidney, Bacon, Donne,
and another two dozen 17th-century writers, and about 2,000 poems in miscellanies.
The collection of continental books (particularly 16th-century) as background
for study of the English Renaissance is extensive.
Restoration and 18th century: There
is a good collection of books printed in England and English books printed
abroad between 1641 and 1700. More than 24,000 titles are present in original
printings with another 3,000 available in photocopies or microfilms. The
Library has about 30,000 18th-century titles, perhaps the largest collection
in the United States. There are 2,500 MSS in the Larpent Collection of
plays produced between 1737 and 1824. The Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu
collection contains 3,000 items; and there are manuscripts by many other
writers, including Swift, Pope, Gray, Fielding, Johnson, Mrs. Thrale,
Goldsmith, Garrick, Burns, and perhaps 75 more.
19th Century: The Library has most
of the early editions of writers of note. A major part of the English
literary MSS (in all about 40,000 MSS by 455 authors) fall in this period;
a few examples are Shelley (5 poems, 3 notebooks, 28 letters; 21 letters
by Harriet Shelley and 181 by Mary Shelley). Lamb (21 poems, 10 pieces
of prose, 211 letters), Blake (16 letters, 35 original drawings, 32 illustrated
books), Charlotte Brontë (122 letters, juvenilia, poems), Jane Porter
(more than 3,000 items by her and by family members), Dickens (3 poems,
15 pieces of prose, 1 letterbook, 993 letters, and 136 to him, several
hundred original drawings to illustrate his novels). Thackeray (129 letters,
and 245 drawings and watercolors, 11 poems, 20 pieces of prose), Ruskin
(22 pieces of prose and 797 letters), Stevenson (5 journals, 32 poems,
25 prose pieces, 91 letters, 3 drawings, 1 sketchbook, 8 journals and
notebooks with drafts of many poems, 11 music scores), Swinburne (42 poems,
23 pieces of prose, 46 letters), Wilkie Collins (12 manuscripts and printed
copies of autograph corrections, 136 letters), William Morris and the
Pre-Raphaelites (700 pieces).
American Literature Before 1900
The Library has most of the early editions of writers of consequence.
The collection of American fiction is (with that in the copyright office)
the largest on record; it contains about 70 percent of all known items.
The collection of MSS includes about 45,000 MSS by 330 authors: a small
fraction consists of the works of such 18th-century writers as Franklin
(autobiography, 25 letters, 8 documents, 1 poem), William Byrd (his journal
in shorthand), Barlow, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather; some examples
of the extensive 19th-century MS holdings are Thoreau (19 poems, 3,000 pages
of prose, 500 corrected proofsheets, and 41 letters and 13 by his sister),
Emerson (10 poems, 300 pages of prose, 68 letters and 46 letters by members
of his family), Hawthorne (1 notebook, 2 poems, drafts and notes for 6 pieces
of prose, 234 letters and 39 by his wife), Longfellow (11 poems, 2 prose
pieces, 215 letters and 175 to him), Harriet Beecher Stowe (870 pages of
prose and 164 letters), Holmes (25 poems, 700 pages of prose, 188 letters),
Twain (1,250 pages of prose and 161 letters), and Henry James (2 pieces
of prose, 174 letters, 1 document).
English and American Literature Since 1900
The collection of books is limited to the works of some 400 authors who
write in English. From time to time new authors are added to the collections.
The Library has significant collections of manuscripts both by and relating
to the following authors: Wallace Stevens (6,815 pieces), Conrad Aiken (4,378
pieces), Jack London (30,000 pieces), Mary Austin (5,500 pieces). The archive
of Patrick Balfour, Lord Kinross, contains about 5,000 items, including
correspondence by Evelyn Waugh and others. The Kingsley Amis collection
numbers approximately 300 items. There are about 200 items by members of
the Bloomsbury group. Other 20th-century authors include Willa Cather, Robert
Frost, William Butler Yeats, Theodore Dreiser, Ambrose Bierce, James Joyce,
and Ford Madox Ford. In addition the Library has small collections of manuscript
material for several science fiction writers.
Additional Research Aids
In addition to the usual catalogs and marked copies of printed bibliographies,
the Library has numerous special indexes for the assistance of scholars.
These include: chronological and alphabetical files for continental holdings
from 1501 to 1800; a chronological catalog of all pre-1800 Huntington books;
a subject index to STC books (1475 - 1640); an extensive index (41 file
drawers) of portraits available in the form of prints, drawings, and paintings
here and in our photograph archives of original prints elsewhere; and a
partial index of the more than 300,000 photographs in the Library. |