Past Exhibitions

The market for children's books was an eighteenth-century innovation. By the last half of the nineteenth century, it was a major publishing enterprise. Efforts to educate greater portions of the populace and a growing middle class had fostered a larger reading public. Advancing technology had changed the appearance and availability of books. New illustrative and binding processes were often tested on books for children, giving them a glamour that dust jackets must provide today.

Drawing on the Morgan Library's important collection of children's literature and a recently acquired collection of musical juvenilia, A Child's Garland of Songs: Music for and by Children comprised music manuscripts, printed songbooks, and pictures of young musicians.

The brilliant and celebrated writer, dramatist, aesthete, wit, and self-proclaimed "lord of language" was the focus of Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts, originally organized by the British Library. Wilde's (1854–1900) rise to success as a literary and social figure was meteoric. His decline to notoriety and disgrace was equally dramatic. Twelve years after publishing his first work of fiction, in 1888, he was dead at the age of forty-six, buried in a pauper's grave on the outskirts of Paris.

Drawing upon the Morgan's collection of Poyer manuscripts, the exhibition also included choice loans of drawings and manuscripts from this country and abroad.