Summary
Overview
Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature
1280s-1950 (mostly 1800s-1930s)
28.2 linear feet, 23 archival boxes; 7 shelves of bound manuscripts, plus 18 drawers of artwork
Princeton University. Library. Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections
Manuscripts Division
One Washington Road
Princeton, New Jersey 08544 USA
Abstract
The Robert H. Taylor Collection consists of over 4,000 rare books and 3,300 manuscripts illustrating in their wide range the scope of English literature from the fourteenth century to the 1940s. This finding aid focuses on the modern manuscripts, both bound and unbound, in the collection, which is designated "RTC01" within the Manuscripts Division of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the Princeton University Library. However, a brief listing of the collection's Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is included.
Description
Description
The collection consists of manuscripts, letters, and documents of numerous and varied authors and artists that span nearly five centuries of English and American literature. There is a variety of related material, such as such as artwork, illustrated albums, letterbooks, and photographs.
Authors most extensively represented include the so-called "Taylor authors"-Max Beerbohm (with numerous caricatures and drawings, correspondence and manuscripts), Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan; George Gordon Byron, and Anthony Trollope.
Other writers significantly represented in the collection, with regard to manuscripts and/or letters, are: the Brontë family (Anne, Charlotte, and Patrick), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Trollope family (Frances Milton, Henry Merivale, T. Adolphus, and Frances Eleanor), Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. The major artists include William Blake, Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cruikshank, Edward Lear, John Everett Millais, William Makepeace Thackeray, and J. M. W. Turner.
Note: A listing of Taylor Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (Series 4) is included as a reference for researchers, but full textual and codicological descriptions of them will eventually be published in a "Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library."
Collection Creator
Biography
Robert Hill Taylor (1908-1985), Princeton University Class of 1930, amassed a distinguished collection of rare books, manuscripts, and drawings during more than 50 years of active collecting. The collection began circa 1930, and was eventually moved to Princeton in 1960 and housed in the former Princetoniana Room in Firestone Library in 1972 before being moved to the high security vault in 2012. The heart of his collection consists of the works of Anthony Trollope (Taylor's favorite author), Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Gordon Byron, and Max Beerbohm. As Taylor himself once stated: "I felt that these were representative authors of their respective periods who could still be collected with some approach to completeness, and so I have tried to specialize in them." 1
His first gift to the Princeton University Library, made in February 1950, was the first edition of Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman (1700). Starting in 1958, Taylor donated his holdings of Victorian fiction (which included numerous presentation copies of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Reade) to the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists (C0171), along with several important Anthony Trollope items from his collection. In addition, Taylor provided the necessary funds that enabled the Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections to purchase a variety of special items, such as the Tollemache Chaucer, a fifteenth-century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales.
Besides his numerous and generous gifts, Taylor was an active participant in the Princeton University library community-giving lectures, selecting and assisting with Library exhibitions, and contributing scholarly articles to the Princeton University Library Chronicle. In addition, he served as the chairman of the Council of the Friends of the Library for 26 years. In 1975, Taylor was fittingly honored with the Donald F. Hyde Award of Princeton University for Distinction in Book Collection and Service to the Community of Scholars. He died in Princeton on May 5, 1985, but his legacy lives on through the distinguished and invaluable collection that bears his name and continues to grow.
1 Robert J. Wickenheiser, "Fifty Years of Collecting: The Collector and His Books" in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Volume XXXXVIII, Numbers 2-3, Winter-Spring 1977, p. 78.
Collection History
Acquisition
Robert H. Taylor, Princeton Class of 1930, placed his library collection on deposit in the Princeton University Library in 1972, and bequeathed it to the Library upon his death in 1985. The Library has accepted gifts and made acquisitions of related material since that time.
"Mysteria Revelata" of John Collins was purchased with funds from the Richard M. Ludwig Endowment established by Michael Spence, Class of 1966.
Archival Appraisal Information
No materials were separated during 2003 processing.
Processing Information
This collection was processed by Sylvia Yu and Teresa Basler in 2002-2003. Finding aid written by Sylvia Yu and Teresa Basler in 2002/2003.
Bibliography
See the double issue of The Princeton University Library Chronicle devoted in its entirety to a survey of the Taylor Collection: Robert J. Wickenheiser, "The Robert H. Taylor Collection" (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 2 and 3; Winter-Spring, 1976-77), contains 13 articles by such scholars as G. E. Bentley, James Thorpe, Mary Hyde, Charles Ryskamp, E.D.H. Johnson ("Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian: Part Two-Manuscripts, Letters, and Drawings," pp. 212-224), H. W. Liebert, Richard M. Ludwig, John V. Fleming, Earl Miner, and Thomas P. Roche. Also, the entire Winter, 1986 issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle focuses on the Robert H. Taylor Collection.
See also: Robert H. Taylor, "Contemporary Collectors III: The Robert H. Taylor Library" in the Book Collector Vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1954); "Association Copies from the Collection of Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (June, 1969), no. 10; and A.D. Wainwright, "Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (1986), no. 38.
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