Tennyson and Pre-Raphaelites
In 1979, the Department was bequeathed the library of Prof. William Doremus Paden of the KU English Department, completing a gift begun in 1972. Particularly important in the Paden gift are his remarkable Tennyson collection with its rich resources for the bibliographical history of Tennyson's publications, and his strong holdings in the Pre-Raphaelites and A.E.W. O'Shaughnessy.
The Tennyson collection begins with his earliest published work, Poems by Two Brothers (1827). It includes a complete run of In Memoriam in all its numbered editions (1-20) and many subsequent unnumbered ones as well, many in multiple states. It also contains an impressive array—beginning with the first state of the first edition—of the various transmogrifications of the Idylls of the King, nicely illustrating both the literary and the bibliographical evolution of this monumental sequence of poems. Seven variant issues of the first edition of Enoch Arden provide examples of the fine distinctions of binding stamps, broken letters, sewers' marks and publishers' catalogues bound-in which are the material of the descriptive bibliographer's craft. Accompanying these is what the eminent bibliographer Thomas J. Wise called the "prepublication state", entitled Idylls of the Hearth and now known to be a Wise forgery. It is perhaps this publication which turned Paden's attention to the career of Wise, on whom he published extensively.
56. Poems by Two Brothers, London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, and J. and J. Jackson, Louth, 1827. Tennyson's first book, written with his brother, Charles. The "Advertisement" states "The following Poems were written from the ages of fifteen to eighteen, not conjointly, but individually". No authors' names appear in the publication, but Charles Tennyson, to whom this copy once belonged, has provided an attribution for each poem by annotating the table of contents "A" or "C" (Alfred or Charles). Bequest of W.D. Paden.
57. Letter of William Holman Hunt to John Everett Millais, 12 May 1858. Hunt discusses plans for submitting pictures to the Liverpool Exhibition, offers his hospitality when Millais visits London, and includes "a design for the principal compartment of a frieze to decorate the new clubhouse" (a light-hearted self-caricature of Hunt, offering Millais' small son Everett a riddle). Bequest of W.D. Paden.
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In addition to the central Tennyson collection, W.D. Paden's library was rich in the Pre-Raphaelites, including a large number of letters and memorabilia of the painter Holman Hunt. Hunt was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, a close friend of the Rossettis, Millais and Ruskin, and moved widely in artistic circles.
58. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems, London: F.S. Ellis, 1870. Cover designed by the poet. In 1862 Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried the manuscript of his poems in the grave of his wife, Lizzie, and turned to painting instead. In 1868 he began writing love poems again. He dug up the manuscript of his early poems in 1869, and in 1870 he published both sets in his first volume of poems, which was reasonably well received. Gift of W.D. Paden.
59. Letter of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Frederic Shields, 24 December 1869. In this letter to Frederic Shields, Rossetti discusses his health (insomnia and the remedy, chloral and whisky, to which he had become addicted), his painting (problems with "models who cannot be got or do not come"), his return to writing, and "Tennyson's new volume [which] does not enlist my sympathies, except a second Northern Farmer which is wonderful". Of his own writing Rossetti says "I have been doing a good deal of work in poetry and shall publish a volume in the Spring. I have got 230 pages in print & want perhaps to add about a 100 more" and refers to it as "the best work of my life such as that has been." Poems of 1870, to which he is referring, ended up with 282 pages.
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The Paden bequest, combined with the department's previous (and subsequent) Pre-Raphaelite acquisitions, has given us very substantial holdings, both printed and manuscript, in this poetic and artistic movement. Among the most substantial of the manuscript materials are the numerous letters of the Rossetti family and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle to the artist, Frederic Shields, and the Pauline Trevelyan journals and sketchbooks.
60. A sketchbook of Lady Pauline Trevelyan, 1848. One of seventy volumes of Lady Pauline's journals and sketchbooks acquired in 1963 from Emily Driscoll. Lady Pauline Trevelyan, wife of Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, was the center of a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites who often visited her home, Wallington Hall—Ruskin, William Bell Scott, Swinburne, Millais, and others. She took an intelligent interest in art, literature, science and technology, and was a good amateur artist herself. She spent much time traveling in Great Britain and Europe, particularly in Italy, and kept journals full of detail, with small sketches in the text. Her sketchbooks are scattered between 1834 and 1866 and complement her journals to some extent. Emily Driscoll, from whom the library acquired the collection, was one of the booksellers who worked most closely with Paden.