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 [...]
Like an item consigned to the Dead Letter Office where Bartleby the Scrivener once worked, this brief note from Herman Melville lay undelivered to scholars and editors for nearly a century until the autograph collection of which it is a part received a full electronic finding aid in 2007. The note, perhaps clipped from a [...]
René Descartes (1596-1650) and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), two of the greatest 17th century French minds, carried on a regular correspondence. In this lengthy 1640 letter to Mersenne, Descartes ranges widely, discussing a dispute with Pierre Bourdin, a Jesuit who had advanced a number of objections to Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, then circulating in manuscript [...]
The curious discovery was related by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) to Jan Ingenhousz (1730-1799) in this week’s letter, which is from Houghton’s Autograph File. Ingenhousz was physician to the court of Austria at the time, and a fellow of the Royal Society who later settled in England. Franklin was in London for his extended second trip [...]
A curiosity in life, Chang Bunker (1811-1874) and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the famous conjoined twins, leave us with this most curious thank you note. The experience of cataloging this letter led to some interesting observations. Chang and Eng spent every moment of their lives together but there is some evidence that they did try to [...]
As a young man of 26, printer Alfred North was so full of passions, doubts and pronouncements of great surety that, though his pen yielded constrained, constant little lines, his thoughts could hardly be whittled into expression, even through the long, looping sentences that filled page upon page of his correspondence. This was especially true [...]
This posting inaugurates a new weekly feature on the Houghton Library blog, “You’ve Got Mail,” based on letters in Houghton Library. Every Friday this year a Houghton staff member will select a letter from the diverse collections in the Library and put that letter into context. It is our hope that this feature will introduce [...]
