Because Little Women is embedded in the American mind as a classic children’s book, readers often forget that Louisa May Alcott always viewed herself as a professional author who wrote in order to make money, much of which went to help support her parents and sisters, and later, nephews and a niece. Between 1868, when [...]
A memorial celebrating the incredible life, teaching, scholarship and collecting of John Milton Ward is being held on Sunday, May 6 at 3pm at Paine Hall in the Harvard Department of Music, where Ward taught for over thirty years. Ward passed away on December 12, 2011. In the 20+ years since his retirement as William [...]
Houghton is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition, “The Natural History of Edward Lear,” guest-curated by Robert McCracken Peck, Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The exhibition will be on view in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room through August 18, 2012. [...]
In the autumn of 1818, 23-year-old John Keats confessed in a letter to his brother George a fascination for one of his neighbors: “Mrs Brawne…still resides in Hampstead…her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange we have a little tiff now and then.” The woman who caught Keats’s attention [...]
The online version of the Houghton Library exhibition “Let Satire Be My Song”: Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, is now live on the HCL web site. The exhibition is a paratextual excursion through this vitriolic satire in verse, written in part as a response to a hostile review of the poet’s first book, Hours [...]
[Thanks to recent Houghton reader Derek Miller, a PhD candidate in Drama at Stanford University, for contributing this post.] Exploring the Harvard Theatre Collection’s rich trove of correspondence among nineteenth-century American theater managers and performers makes clear how small this community was. Letters in the HTC capture managers negotiating contracts for star performers, haggling over [...]
Opening today is “The Adventures of Thackeray In His Way Through the World” a new exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray. Houghton will also host a symposium on Thackeray’s life and work on October 6th. The symposium is free, but advance registration is required; see the website for more [...]
Houghton’s current exhibition, “The Bible in Type, from Gutenberg to Rogers”, marks the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible by looking at the history of the Bible as a designed book. It offers viewers the rare opportunity to see such landmarks of printing as the Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1455), the Plantin [...]
[Thanks to Project Music Cataloger Christina Linklater for contributing this post.] In 1794, a governmental decree led to the foundation of a new music publishing firm in Paris. The company’s full name, Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales, indicates that this was a practical enterprise, one of many new initiatives brought forth as [...]
The Houghton Library and the Harvard Divinity School join in commemorating the centenary of the death of Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James. Linda Simon, biographer of William James, will deliver the annual William James Lecture on Wednesday, October 27th, at 5.15 P.M. in the Lamont Forum Room. Simon’s talk, “William James’s Transitions,” looks at [...]
