Sal Robinson's blog

Every summer since 2015, a paid undergraduate intern from the University of Pennsylvania’s RealArts@Penn program program has joined the Literary and Historical Manuscripts Department staff at the Morgan. Two summers ago, Delaney Keenan (who graduated this June with a B.A. in Art History from Penn) spent part of her internship working on a project to survey and study the department’s holdings of the letters of women artists.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” is an extended meditation on immobility. Lamed for a few days in a household accident, Coleridge took the opportunity to write about what it is like to stay in one place and to think about your friends traveling through the world.

One of the questions my co-cataloguer on the Levy Project, Pam Abernathy, and I pose as we work our way through the collection of letters and manuscripts in the Morgan’s holdings is: how was it made? In most cases, it’s not complicated: the letter was written by hand, by the person who was responsible for its content. But in the case of MA 6390.3, a small scrap of paper that forms part of the Morgan’s large Lewis Carroll collection, matters were not so clear.

Ann Julia Hatton (1764-1838) lived a highly dramatic life, appropriate for a member of the Kemble family whose ranks were full of actors and actresses, the most famous among them being Sarah Siddons.

As a cataloguer working on the Morgan’s collection of materials related to the eighteenth-century novelist Frances Burney, I’ve come across little-known items which, when examined closely, prove to have unexpected depths.

Working my way through the Morgan’s enormous collection of letters, one by one—as I’ve been doing for the past ten months on a cataloging grant from the Leon Levy Foundation—has meant regularly encountering extraordinary items whose significance often hasn’t been fully understood.