Month: May 2020

Houghton Library is home to the distinguished collection of George Chaffee (1907-1984), a dancer, balletophile, and collector. Although he specialized in the French Romantic ballet, some delightful bits of his collection available digitally are a series of illustrations showing “kinderballets” staged in Vienna during the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Horschelt (1793-1876). Horschelt was a…

Houghton Library has a famously strong collection of richly illustrated medieval manuscripts, many of which can be viewed online here. But, if your eyes grow weary of beautiful illuminations, I invite you to explore our collection of charters relating to the Cistercian abbey of Buckland in Devon, England (MS Lat 10, digitized here). While less…

In the preface to his 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (including his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales), George Birkbeck Hill laments how intervals of time and distance complicated his task of reviving Johnson, England’s greatest eighteenth century man of letters, for a…

Experience the works of the father of English poetry the way some of his earliest readers did via digital copies of his works held in our collections. Houghton has digitized two 16th century editions of Chaucer’s works. Richard Pynson published editions of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame together in…

Feeling disconnected at home? You’re not alone. Diana Churchill is literally beside herself in this zany portrait by Angus McBean from 1940. Angus McBean’s portraits of actors are among the most complete visual records of the British stage from the 1930s through the 1960s. Early in his career, he dabbled in the surreal, producing a…

The multi-talented Edward Lear is probably best remembered today for The Owl and the Pussycat and other “nonsense books” as he called them, but his artistic skills far surpassed the whimsical sketches with which he illustrated those books. Our collection of Edward Lear Landscape Drawings includes more than 6000 digital images of Lear’s work, drawn…

In the 17th century, a book was a relatively expensive luxury, but single-sheet printed items were much more widely affordable. One particularly popular form was the broadside ballad, each containing a song that might be funny, scandalous, politically charged, or perhaps all of those at once. These printed ballads continue a long oral tradition of…

Currently, we are at a remove from our physical collections. The silver lining we’ve found in this is an opportunity to highlight our born-digital and digitized collections so you can explore them from wherever you are. We’re going to do just that in a series we call “Houghton From Home.” For more items from across…