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A letter of the Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598)
to his nephew Jacob Cole, regarding color illustrations
for his Theatrum orbis terrarum. |
The Richards Collection, a gift of Paul
C. Richards, Boston University, Class of 1960, consists of
more than 4000 manuscripts, 1500 etchings and engravings,
hundreds of signed photographs and documents of state from
American and European sources, and historical recordings.
Extending from 1490 to the present day, the Richards Collection
encompasses literature, science, music, religion, social reform,
politics, statecraft, travel, exploration, and journalism.
From a candid letter on political integrity
written by Horace Walpole in 1764 to Aldous Huxley’s
accounts of his LSD experiments in 1960, the gallery of English
writers contains materials by virtually all major literary
figures. Among these are: letters of Carlyle, Hardy, Coleridge,
Tennyson, Stevenson, Yeats and Lawrence; prose manuscripts
by DeQuincey, Dickens and Kipling; fiction manuscripts by
Coppard, Maugham and John Cowper Powys; and holograph verse
by Wordsworth, Wilde and Charles Lamb.
American literary personalities are equally
well represented. Scholars will find manuscripts of poems
by Longfellow and Whittier, original reminiscences by Eugene
Field and Booth Tarkington, the typescript of Mourning
Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill, fiction in
manuscript by Louisa May Alcott, reportage by John Steinbeck,
and letters of Thoreau, Emerson, Cather, Poe and Hemingway.
Balzac, the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Dumas, Proust, Strindberg
and Chekhov are some of the Continental writers whose letters
and manuscripts are available in the Richards Collection.
Holdings of manuscripts in other fields
are equally fine. Among scientists, there are revealing letters
by Einstein, Agassiz, Edison and Pasteur. The geographer Ortelius
requests color plates in 1595 for his great work, Theatrum
orbis terrarum; and John James Audubon solicits funds
in 1838 for his renowned Birds of
America. Explorers from Sir Walter Raleigh to Amelia
Earhart discuss their plans and achievements; David Livingstone
reports to the prime minister on his discovery of Lake Nyasa
and on the African slave trade. William Penn writes from England
in 1691 to his followers in the New World; Nehru comments
on “these last five years of horror” from prison
in 1941; Lord Nelson discusses the nature of political power
from on board the Victory
in 1804; and Henry VII of England writes in 1497 to Princess
Juana about her part in a recent commercial treaty.
Philosophers and reformers from John
Locke to Bertrand Russell, religious leaders from Cotton Mather
to Cardinal Newman, American Presidents from Washington to
Ford, musical manuscripts of Donizetti, Liszt, Karl Maria
von Weber and Mendelssohn, and letters by Prokofiev, Richard
Strauss and Franck are present in the collection. Other figures
are represented by a wealth of material, such as the fifty
letters and manuscripts of the Unitarian minister Edward Everett,
the twenty-year correspondence (as well as literary manuscripts
and notebooks) of the psychologist Havelock Ellis, and the
large archive of the American poet Diane DiPrima.
The scholarly content of practically
all of the items in the Richards Collection is of great significance.
Many are eyewitness accounts by the principal participants
of major historical events, or reflective evaluations by artists
and thinkers of their intentions, methods and achievements
and those of their contemporaries.
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The corrected carbon typescript
of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning
Becomes Electra: A Trilogy,
first performed in 1931.
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